Tyger, tyger, burnt out
The demise of the thylacine
The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, has acquired almost mythical status since it was hunted to extinction last
century. Once widespread across Tasmania, the Australian continent and New Guinea, the thylacine seems
to have been quite susceptible to changes in its habitat, and its fate was sealed when European settlers
decided that it posed an unacceptable threat to their sheep.
BY MARK KELLETT
T
ALES OF STRANGE
carnivorous beasts lurking in
the forests of Van Diemen’s
Land had been told since
the visit of the Dutch explorer, Abel
Tasman, in 1642. His pilot-major,
Francoys Jacobz, had led a shore party
on the 2nd of December and
described finding “the footing of wild
beasts having claws like a tiger”.
However, his report, as with many
others of strange tracks and halfglimpsed animals that followed it, is
so vague that modern readers cannot
be certain what animal is being
described (wombats, for example,
have such long claws).
On the 21st of April, 1805, the
Sydney Gazette printed a report of a
strange animal found near the shortlived settlement at Yorktown on Port
Dalrymple in the north of the island.
An animal of a truly singular and
novel description was killed by dogs
on the 30th of March on a hill
immediately contiguous to the
settlement. From the following
minute description of which, by
Lieutenant Governor PATERSON, it
must be considered of a species
perfectly distinct from any of the
animal creation hitherto known, and
certainly the only powerful and
terrific of the carnivorous and
voracious tribe yet discovered on any
part of New Holland or its adjacent
islands.
Paterson’s detailed description is the
first indisputable account of an animal
PICTURE ABOVE: Male and female of the
Thylacinus cynocephalus. (1841), H. C.
Richter. From Mammals of Australia by John
Gould (1804–1881). Even at this early
date, Gould was pessimistic about the
thylacine’s survival. National Library of Australia,
nla.pic-vn3292764.
Australian Heritage 73
that was to become despised by, and
later emblematic of the people of the
island.
It is very evident that this species is
destructive, and lives entirely on
animal food; as on dissection his
stomach was found filled with a
quantity of kangaroo, weighing 5lbs,
the weight of the whole animal 45lbs.
From its interior structure it must be
a brute peculiarly quick of digestion;
the dimensions were, ... length of the
eye, which is remarkably large and
black, 13/4 inches; ... length of the
tail, 1 foot 8 inches; length of the
fore leg 11 inches; and of the fore
foot, 5 inches; the fore foot with 5
blunt claws; ... stripes across the back
20, on the tail 3; 2 of the stripes
extend down each thigh; length of
the hind leg from the heel to the
thigh, 1 foot; length of hind foot, 6
inches; the hind foot with 4 blunt
claws, the soles of the feet without
hair; ... 8 fore teeth in the upper jaw,
and 6 in the under; 4 grinders of a
side, in the upper and lower jaw; 3
single teeth also in each; 4 tusks, or
canine teeth, length of each 1 inch;
... the body short hair and smooth,
of a greyish colour, the stripes
black; the hair on the neck is
rather longer than that on
the body; the hair on the
ears of a light brown
colour, on the inside
rather long. The form
of the animal is
that of a hyaena, at
the same time
strongly
reminding the
observer of the
appearance of a
low wolf dog.
Van Diemen’s
Land’s first SurveyorGeneral, George Harris,
officially described the animal in
1806 on the basis of two male
specimens that had been caught with
traps baited with kangaroo-meat.
Placing it in the same genus as the
American opossums, he gave it the
scientific name of Didelphis
cynocephala (dog-headed opossum).
The creature he described would
come to be known by an astonishing
range of common names, almost all of
them misleading as to its affinities:
legunta, dog-faced dasyurus, hyena
opossum, zebra opossum, Tasmanian
dingo, pouched wolf, striped wolf,
Tasmanian wolf, zebra wolf, and
Tasmanian tiger. In 1824 another
naturalist, Coenraad Temminck,
recognised the animal as distinct from
the American marsupials and gave its
74 Australian Heritage
modern name: Thylacinus cynocephalus
(pouched and dog-headed), and
hence thylacine, the common name
now most often used.
The thylacine superficially
resembled a German shepherd dog in
size and shape. However, while dogs
are placental mammals, thylacines
were marsupials related to the
Tasmanian devil, giving birth to up to
four young at an early stage of
development and rearing them in a
backward-facing pouch. In a process
called convergent evolution, the
similar way of life adopted by the
ancestors of thylacines
and dogs led to their
descendants
developing a
similar form.
of Austral-Asia of 1839, “...in running
it bounds like a kangaroo, though not
with such speed.”
The thylacine may have attempted
to catch its prey in an ambush, but if
that failed, it would patiently trot
after its prey. Its persistence was
notable, as a miner named Oscar
described in the Mercury in 1882:
“This native tiger is not swift, and is
very awkward in turning, but it
follows the trail by its never-erring
scent, and in the long run is sure of
its prey.”
When the thylacine caught up with
its prey, usually small kangaroos,
wallabies, possums, sometimes
native rodents, bandicoots, birds,
lizards and even echidnas, its
jaws and teeth were put to
work. Its jaw had the largest
gape of any land mammal and
could close with great force, as
the hunter Hugh Mackay related:
A bull-terrier once set upon a wolf
and bailed it up in a niche in some
rocks. There the wolf stood, with its
back to the wall, turning its head
from side to side, checking the terrier
as it tried to butt in from alternate
and opposite directions. Finally the
dog came in close and the wolf gave
one sharp, fox-like bite, tearing
a piece of the dog’s skull
clean off and it fell
with its brain
protruding, dead.
Zebra, or dog-faced dasyurus. Didelphis
cynocephala. Harris, James Basire, Georges
Cuvier, State Library of Tasmania. Clearly the artist
had not seen the living animal.
There were other important
differences between dogs and
thylacines. Thylacines had a rather
stiffer spine and tail, shorter legs, and
feet that were held flatter to the
ground than dogs of similar size. This
combination of features gave it a
different gait, endowing the animal
with endurance at the expense of
speed. Certainly dogs seem to have
easily caught up with them. Perhaps
misled by the fact that the thylacine’s
front legs are rather shorter than the
rear, R M Martin noted in his History
Like other
carnivorous
marsupials, its fangs
were oval and suited for
crushing, while the
molars were somewhat
primitive and shaped for
cutting (dogs, by contrast, have
slashing canines and a mixture of
slicing and crushing molars).
Thylacine teeth are almost unworn,
supporting records of the marsupial
delicately picking out the most
nutritious parts of its prey: the heart,
lungs, liver, kidneys, and if it was
really famished, the muscle from the
inner thighs, leaving the rest for
scavengers like Tasmanian devils.
This fussy diet may have led to the
wholly erroneous belief that the
thylacine fed on blood, first recorded
by British scientist Geoffrey Smith in
1909. This myth doubtless helped to
make the animal an object of hatred
and fear.
Though it is difficult to reconstruct
the behaviour of an extinct animal,
some of the most striking differences
A rare photograph of one of the last thylacines held in captivity. Like ‘Benjamin’, who was possibly the last member of the species, its end was
probably a lonely one.
between thylacines and dogs might
have been behavioural. It is now
known that many marsupials have a
brain two-thirds the size of placental
mammal of similar size and habit, and
thylacines were no exception to this.
This may have been the result of a
simpler social structure, thylacines
hunted alone or perhaps as a mated
pair or as a mother with joeys, while
dogs form much larger packs. With
less need to communicate, thylacines
do not seem to have vocalised much,
communicating among themselves
with a muted coughing bark and
giving a hissing growl when
antagonised. Ultimately, the
thylacines smaller brain and simpler
behaviour may have reduced its
capacity to adapt to the changes that
overtook it.
The thylacine was the last survivor
of a once successful family. Twelve
fossil members of the thylacine family
are described in a recent paper by
Stephen Wroe, ranging from fox-sized
to wolf-sized predators, most of which
lived between 20 million and 8
million years ago in different parts of
Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea.
Over this period, there seem to have
been between four or five thylacine
species living at any given time. By
the time the first Aboriginal people
arrived some 60,000 years ago, their
fortunes had waned and only the
modern thylacine remained.
Thylacines became extinct in New
Guinea about 10,000 years ago and in
mainland Australia about 3,000 years
ago. Although the causes of these
extinctions are not known, the
disappearance of the thylacine in
Australia coincided with the arrival of
the first dingos (Canis familiaris). It
has been suggested that the dingo may
have competed catastrophically with
the mainland thylacine for food and
living space. Though there are
suggestions that small relic thylacine
populations may have persisted on the
mainland, only in Tasmania, isolated
from the mainland by Bass Strait
about 12,000 years ago, did it survive
to be seen by Europeans with
certainty.
This isolation ended abruptly in
1803 when the British colonised Van
Diemen’s Land in a move to thwart
any territorial ambitions of the
French. A year later Hobart Town
(later Hobart) and Patersonia (later
Launceston) were founded. Two
animals that came in the company of
the settlers were to prove deadly for
the thylacine.
In the chaotic conditions of the
early settlements, some domestic dogs
escaped and formed feral packs. It is
possible that such wild dogs attacked
thylacine; domestic dogs have been
described as being either terrified or
enraged by them. Dogs also would
have competed with thylacines for the
kangaroos and wallabies that made up
the bulk of its diet. Ultimately, the
worst effect of feral dogs on the
thylacine would turn out to be an
indirect one.
In the early Tasmanian settlements,
sheep were primarily a food supply for
the colonists, though small numbers of
wool-producing sheep were on the
island as early as 1806. With the
mainland settlements making fortunes
from wool, significant numbers of
merino sheep began to arrive in Van
Diemen’s Land after 1820. There were
some losses among these early flocks
and. although it does not seem
unreasonable that thylacines might
have been responsible for some of
them, reports of spree-kills of sheep
seem more likely to have been the
work of dogs. However, a series of
mistaken human acts ensured that the
thylacine would take the blame.
By 1819, the Van Diemen’s Land
flocks were more than twice the size
of those of the New South Wales
colonies. Anxious to maintain
investment in the mainland colony,
W C Wentworth wrote about a wholly
imaginary “animal of the panther
tribe” that “...commits dreadful havoc
among the flocks.”. Unfortunately,
this was misconstrued as a description
of the thylacine, and three years later
the Surveyor General, George
William Evans, paraphrased
Wentworth’s description in the
Description of Van Diemen’s Land.
In 1826 the Van Diemen’s Land
Company was granted extensive
Australian Heritage 75
A more accurate portrayal of the thylacine from The Mammals of Australia,1869, Harriet Scott, Thomas Richards, Victor A Prout,
Allport Library and
Museum of Fine Arts.
holdings in the north-west of the
island to farm sheep. However, the
land was poorly selected and the sheep
died of exposure or starvation, or were
taken by predators, human and
animal, imported and indigenous.
Ignoring the more serious difficulties,
the company’s directors seized on the
wild predators as a problem they could
solve. In 1830 the company offered
five shillings for male thylacines and
seven for females, with half these
amounts for Tasmanian devils and
feral dogs, an odd choice, considering
that the company’s records indicate
that dogs were responsible for most
kills. The company offered rewards for
thylacines on and off until into the
next century, and other graziers
followed its example. It seems that
this bounty-hunting may have only
reduced thylacine numbers near
inhabited areas, but did set a
precedent for how the animal was to
be dealt with.
Prophetically, the great naturalist,
John Gould, suggested in his classic
Mammals of Australia that the
thylacine might not be able to
withstand such persecution
indefinitely:
76 Australian Heritage
When the comparatively small island
of Tasmania becomes more densely
populated, and its primitive forests are
intersected from the eastern to the
western coast, the numbers of this
singular animal will speedily diminish,
extermination will have its full sway,
and it will then, like the Wolf in
England and Scotland, be recorded as
an animal of the past: although this
will be a source of much regret,
neither the shepherd nor the farmer
can be blamed for wishing to rid the
island of so troublesome a creature.
Through the 1880s, the wool
industry was in crisis, and the colonial
government was under pressure to
help the industry. Although a crash in
the price of wool, drought, disease,
rabbit plagues and wild dogs were the
main problems, wealthy farmers’ lobby
groups like the Buckland and Spring
Bay Tiger and Eagle Extermination
Association, the Glamorgan Stock
Protection Association, the OatlandsRoss Landowners Association and the
Midlands Stock Protection
Association agitated for the
government to take action against the
thylacine.
They found their voice in the
ambitious Tasmanian House of
Assembly member for Glamorgan,
John ‘Tiger’ Lyne. In 1886, after citing
the inflated figure of “...30,000 or
40,000 sheep were killed annually by
dingoes”, and arguing that since the
thylacines were breeding on crown
land the onus was on the government
to control them, he proposed £500 be
set aside each year for the destruction
of the thylacine, with £1 paid for each
adult thylacine killed and 10 shillings
for each pup. In the face of dissent
about the cost of the proposal, the bill
was deadlocked. It was only passed
with the vote of the Speaker of the
House, Alfred Dobson, an action
against custom whereby the Speaker is
expected to vote against such a
deadlocked bill. The first bounty was
paid in 1888. Deafness forced Lyne to
retire from politics in 1893, but 2184
thylacines were to be killed as a
consequence of his attempt to seek
the vote of the woolly aristocracy.
The task of hunting the thylacine
fell to ‘tiger men’. The animal’s shy,
solitary and nocturnal nature made it
difficult to hunt. Some trapped the
marsupial with a snare left in a hole in
a fence or on a forest game trail.
Others used dogs to track and corner
the thylacine.
Tiger men returning from a hunt
took the carcasses to the local police
station, where the ears and toes were
clipped to show that a bounty had
been paid. Farmers would sometimes
pay an equivalent bounty for a
thylacine carcass. The carcass itself
seems to have been considered useless.
It has often been said that thousands
of waistcoats were made of the
animal’s pelts, but this seems to be
apocryphal; certainly no such garment
is known to exist now. A few
thylacine-skin rugs were made, and a
rather ghoulish individual made a
pincushion with a thylacine skull.
Not everyone applauded the
slaughter. Like most carnivores, adult
thylacines were wary of man, but joeys
taken young enough could be readily
tamed and trained. In 1842 the
botanist Ronald Gunn described his
experience of raising and taming three
thylacine joeys in the Papers and
Proceedings of the Royal Society of Van
Diemen’s Land. He was a rare voice of
support for the thylacine, asserting “It
seems far from being a vicious animal
at its worst, and the name Tiger or
Hyaena gives a most unjust idea of its
fierceness.”
Zoos had also acted to improve the
thylacine’s reputation. They were kept
locally in Hobart and Launceston, on
the mainland in Sydney, Melbourne
and Adelaide and as far away as
Britain, Germany, Austro-Hungary,
America, India and South Africa.
They were not regarded as very
glamorous creatures; like most
carnivores in captivity they were
rather smelly, and forcing the animal
to be active during the day made
them lethargic and stressed. Zoos
made no direct contribution to the
conservation of the thylacine, as they
were not kept in such a way as to
encourage breeding in captivity, but
they did act to shift public opinion
away from the belief that the animal
was a blood-drinking monster. There
were tentative calls for its destruction
to be curbed.
By this time the animal was in need
of such protection. Each year the
bounty was in effect, the government
was paying for 100 or so thylacines.
This number halved in 1906 and,
when the bounty was withdrawn in
1909, only two bounties had been
paid. Prices offered by zoos, between
£7 and £8, had something to do with
this. But it was also clear that the
thylacine had undergone an islandwide population crash. Its exact cause
is not known, though contemporary
reports of thylacines suffering from a
debilitating disease must be
considered a possible cause.
After the Great War it was apparent
the thylacine was very rare. Prices
offered by zoos rose again and again,
London zoo paying £150 for one in
1926. Scientists and naturalists like
Thomas Flynn, Professor of Zoology at
the University of Tasmania, and Clive
Lord, director of the Tasmanian
Museum, patiently fought through a
political smokescreen that the
thylacine was in no danger and a
bureaucratic minefield to have the
thylacine protected. In 1930 they
succeeded in getting a ban on hunting
thylacines during their breeding
season in December and on the
international traffic in live animals.
Yet it was still shot for sport or as a
pest. In the same year a farmer from
Mawbanna named Wilf Batty,
incensed by an adult female
thylacine’s spree in a chicken coop,
became the last man indisputably to
have shot a wild thylacine.
Surprisingly, there is controversy
about the identity of the last
thylacine in captivity. The female
could either have been sold to the zoo
as a joey by Walter Mullins in 1924
along with her mother and two littermates, or as an adult in 1933 by Elias
Churchill. It is possible that both are
true, that when the older thylacine
died she was discreetly replaced with
the younger one, as a parent may
replace a child’s beloved budgie to
avoid a fuss.
In 1933 she was visited by David
Fleay, who had unsuccessfully applied
for the position of Director of the
Tasmanian Museum. While in the
Native Tiger of Tasmania shot by Weaver 1869 (Thylacine), 1869.
One of the few photographs of a thylacine from the 19th century.
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
Australian Heritage 77
Thylacine: Wilf Batty with animal shot at Mawbanna, 1931.
the terrified reaction of the dog to Batty’s kill.
vicinity, he gained the zoo’s
permission to enter the animal’s
enclosure and film it. While Fleay was
arranging the camera, the thylacine
crept around and bit him on the
backside. Fleay was more amused than
angry, and carried the scar proudly for
the rest of his days. This incident
produced just over a minute of silent,
black and white footage that is the
only film record of the thylacine.
The last thylacine in captivity died,
alone and neglected, on the 7th of
September, 1936. Ironically, she had
spent the last two months of her life
as what seems to have been the sole
representative of a completely
protected species. Even more
ironically, as the result of an apparent
scam by a Geelong resident named
Frank Darby, she has come to be
known as Benjamin.
It took some time for people to
realise that the thylacine had become
extinct. Books written as late as the
1970s either describe the thylacine as
a living animal or as “possibly
extinct”. Expeditions were sent out
over the twentieth century, among
them one led by Fleay in 1945, with
their objective gradually changing
from capturing one for a zoo to
proving the continued existence of
the species. However, none of them
yielded anything other than brief,
unverifiable sightings and smudged
prints.
78 Australian Heritage
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
Note
Proving an animal is extinct, like
proving any negative, is difficult. A
rule of thumb commonly accepted
among biologists is that if there has
been no indisputable evidence of an
organism for 50 years, the animal is
considered extinct. Although there is
a background noise of sightings in
Tasmania and even a few on the
mainland and New Guinea, none are
accompanied by indisputable
evidence. When even a recent $1.2
million reward offered by the Bulletin
magazine cannot produce such
evidence, it appears the animal is
indeed extinct.
Ironically, the people whose
ancestors harried the thylacine out of
existence have adopted it as a mascot.
A pair of thylacines flanks the
Tasmanian coat of arms and anyone
who wishes to show their pride in
their Tasmanian heritage, from the
environmentalist lobby to big
business, places one on their banner.
It is a pity the animal could not have
gained such status while it was alive,
though perhaps it could only adopt
such a cuddly image by being safely
dead.
In 1999 a team based in the
Australian Museum led by Michael
Archer sought to reverse this
situation. They hoped to isolate DNA
from a thylacine joey preserved in
spirits in 1866, with the ultimate aim
of cloning the animal and
regenerating the species. Although the
team was able to succeed in its first
goal, and even got as far as
determining the sequence of three
thylacine genes, in 2005 it was
realised that genetic technology is
simply not advanced enough to
achieve Archer’s very ambitious
objective.
What is known about the thylacine
has been reconstructed from
examination of dead specimens and
from a motley assembly of the
recollections of people who claimed to
know it, most of whom are now dead.
Though this approach is useful, it
leaves many questions unresolved.
When the biology and ecology of the
animal itself are disputed, the forces
that pushed it to extinction must be
similarly unclear. How important was
hunting? How important was landclearing? How important were dogs;
and if so, was it directly, by hunting,
or indirectly through competition for
food sources? What role, if any, did
disease play?
Any change in the relative
importance of these factors ultimately
alters the answer posed by modern
scientists and naturalists: could the
thylacine have been saved? Since
their predecessors could not even
determine whether the marsupial
should have been saved, the question
will remain unanswered.
The Author
Dr Mark Kellett is a biologist and a
freelance science writer.
Further Reading
Thylacine by David Owen, Allen &
Unwin, 2003.
The Last Tasmanian Tiger by Robert Paddle,
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Australian Marsupial Carnivores: Recent
Advances in Palaeontology by Stephen
Wroe, in Predators with Pouches: the
Biology of Carnivorous Marsupials, edited
by Menna Jones, Chris Dickman &
Mike Archer, CSIRO Publishing, 2003.
Mammals of Australia by John Gould,
annotated by Joan M Dixon,
Macmillan, 1983.
Furred Animals of Australia by Ellis
Troughton, Angus and Robinson, 1946.
The Doomsday Book of Animals by David
Day, Ebury Press, 1981.
Extinct by Anton Gill and Alex West,
Channel 4 Books, 2001 (the television
documentary series is also very useful).
The Thylacine Museum website:
www.naturalworlds.org/thylacine ◆