So, you’ve probably seen headlines about bringing back the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine—a carnivorous marsupial that vanished last century. Scientists are now trying to recreate the thylacine by piecing together its genome from preserved specimens and using modern biotech to produce animals with thylacine traits.
Let’s dig into how the thylacine lived, why it disappeared, and what researchers are doing to rebuild its DNA. This background should help you weigh the science, the risks, and what a real thylacine return could mean for nature and conservation.
Wondering about the evidence? Later, you’ll see the genetic work and meet the research teams, including the folks who recently reported a nearly complete thylacine genome. That news has really fired up the whole effort.
The Tasmanian Tiger: History and Extinction
Here’s what you need to know about how the thylacine looked, why it vanished, and its place in Tasmanian and Australian ecosystems.
Thylacine Biology and Appearance
The thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, was a carnivorous marsupial about the size of a medium dog.
You’d spot a long, stiff tail, a narrow snout, and a kind of awkward, stiff gait. Its short fur was sandy to brown, with 13–20 dark stripes running across its back and tail.
Like kangaroos and wallabies, the thylacine had a pouch. Females carried their young there until the little ones could move around on their own.
Its jaws could open surprisingly wide, but the bite wasn’t all that strong compared to placental predators.
Thylacines hunted small to medium prey—think wallabies, bandicoots, birds. They probably hunted alone or in pairs, relying more on stealth than speed.
Causes and Timeline of Extinction
European settlement in the 1800s kicked off the thylacine’s decline.
Habitat loss from land clearing and sheep farming shrank its range and food sources.
Colonists blamed thylacines for livestock losses and governments paid bounties for each one killed. That policy slashed their numbers fast.
Disease, competition from dogs, and maybe dingoes piled on the pressure.
The species had already vanished from mainland Australia thousands of years earlier, so by the time Europeans arrived, it survived only in Tasmania.
Someone shot the last wild thylacine in 1930.
The last captive thylacine died at Hobart Zoo in 1936, and after that, scientists declared the species extinct.
Ecological Role in Tasmania and Australia
The thylacine was the top native predator in Tasmania’s forests and grasslands.
It kept wallaby and small mammal populations in check, which shaped the plants and undergrowth.
When the thylacine disappeared, the balance shifted. Tasmanian devils and feral dogs took over some roles, but they hunted differently.
That change affected prey behavior and numbers, which in turn influenced vegetation and the smaller creatures living there.
If anyone tries to reintroduce or mimic the thylacine, they’ll need to study prey populations—like wallabies—and interactions with Tasmanian devils and other species. Otherwise, they could end up harming the ecosystem in unexpected ways.
How Scientists Are Trying to Revive the Tasmanian Tiger
Scientists are busy rebuilding the Tasmanian tiger’s genome from old museum specimens. They’re using living marsupials as biological tools.
This work mixes ancient DNA, gene editing, and surrogate biology to try and recreate something close to the original thylacine.
Breakthroughs in Thylacine Genome Sequencing
Teams have sequenced nearly complete thylacine genomes from well-preserved museum samples.
The UCSC Paleogenomics Lab and their collaborators worked on a 110-year-old preserved head to build a high-quality thylacine genome. That reference lets them spot the DNA changes that made thylacines unique.
Researchers aren’t just looking at DNA—they also study longer RNA molecules to understand gene regulation, not just the code itself.
Better genomes help scientists design precise edits and find gaps where genetic material is missing or damaged.
These advances allow groups like Colossal Biosciences and academic labs to compare thylacine DNA to living marsupials, searching for the best match for cellular tools.
De-Extinction Methods and Technologies
The plan goes step by step: sequence the genome, build a reference, edit a living animal’s genome, and develop embryos.
They use CRISPR and other gene-editing tools to tweak stem cells from a living marsupial, swapping in thylacine sequences.
The process depends on high-quality reference genomes and careful editing across many genes.
Cloning and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are both on the table. Cloning would need intact thylacine cells, which are extremely rare.
Gene-editing stem cells gives another route when only DNA fragments are available.
Labs working on thylacine projects borrow technical lessons from other efforts, like woolly mammoth and dodo research, to handle multi-gene edits and avoid off-target changes.
The Role of the Fat-Tailed Dunnart and Surrogacy
Researchers plan to use the fat-tailed dunnart or other small marsupials as cellular and reproductive stand-ins.
The fat-tailed dunnart shares key marsupial traits, making it useful for growing edited embryos and testing gene expression in a living marsupial.
Edited dunnart stem cells might serve as a stepping stone before trying larger surrogates.
Surrogacy is still a big hurdle. Scientists are thinking about implanting embryos into a closely related marsupial or developing an artificial uterus.
Both options have biological and ethical limits.
The University of Melbourne and other Australian labs are studying marsupial reproductive timing and immune compatibility, hoping to improve embryo survival in surrogate species.
Challenges and Ethical Considerations
Technical gaps pop up everywhere—degraded DNA, missing regulatory RNA data, and big question marks about how thylacines actually developed. Scientists have to try over and over to sort out gene interactions and developmental signals, since old DNA just doesn’t tell the whole story.
Honestly, making a healthy, living animal could take decades of careful genetic work. That’s a long haul.
Ethical worries come up, too. People debate the welfare of surrogate animals, how a thylacine would fit into today’s ecosystem, and whether we should focus on saving animals that are still around. Some researchers at the Australian Museum say the money and effort might be better spent protecting species that are actually endangered right now.
Teams led by folks like Beth Shapiro and Andrew Pask, and companies such as Colossal Biosciences (with Ben Lamm in the mix), bring in ethicists to talk through the risks. It’s important to think about what we’re really making—is a “proxy thylacine” with lots of genetic edits even close to the real thing?
