The remains of the last Tasmanian tiger, Australia’s only predatory marsupial to went extinct in 1936were found in a cabinet in a museum, 85 years after they were declared missingInstitutional sources from the oceanic country reported this Monday.
The last specimen of the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus) that is known died in captivity on September 7, 1936 at the zoo in the Australian city of Hobart His remains were subsequently handed over to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG).
This specimen, an elderly female, was captured by a hunter in the Florentine Valley on the island of Tasmania, in South Australia, and sold to the Hobart Zoo, the capital of this region, in May 1936.
missing remains
“For years, many curators and museum researchers searched for his remains without success.as no thylacine material dating to 1936 had been recorded in the zoological collection, so it was assumed that his body had been discarded,” said researcher Robert Paddle in a TMAG statement.
Paddle and Kathryn Medlock, who will publish their find this week in the scientific journal ‘Australian Zoologist’, discovered that the remains of the Tasmanian Tiger did arrive at TMAG in 1936 – although their arrival was not properly recorded by the museum’s taxidermists – thanks a a key document that made it possible to trace the remains of the animal.
The researchers also discovered that the remains of this extinct specimen (the flayed skin and the skeleton) were used for traveling exhibitions and therefore they were kept in a cabinet in the educational section of the museum.
“The hide was carefully tanned as a flat hide by the museum’s taxidermist, William Cunningham, thus allowing it to be easily transported and used as a Demonstration specimen for school classes on Tasmanian marsupials”specified Medlock, curator of the department of vertebrate zoology at TMAG.
The thylacine, a marsupial with stripes across its back reminiscent of a tiger, once lived on mainland Australia and on the island of New Guinea, although It disappeared from those places about 3,000 years ago due to climate change.
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The island of Tasmania was the only place where the species survived, but its extinction accelerated with the arrival of Europeans in Oceania in the 18th century, who launched a intense hunting campaign between 1830 and 1909buoyed by bounties to kill off this cattle-eating predator.
Although Tasmanian tigers went extinct 85 years ago when the last one died at Hobart Zoo, the species was only officially declared extinct in the 1980s.