Willem is a wildlife artist based in South Africa. He says "My aim is simply to express the beauty and wonder that is in Nature, and to heighten people's appreciation of plants, animals and the wilderness. Not everything I paint is African! Though I've never been there, I'm also fascinated by Asia and I've done paintings of Asian rhinos and birds as well. I may in future do some of European, Australian and American species too. I'm fascinated by wild things from all over the world! I mainly paint in watercolours. . . but actually many media including 'digital' paintings with the computer!"

I bring you a scene no more to be seen, a forest-inhabiting Thylacine. The Thylacine, Thylacinus cynocephalus, is also known as a Tasmanian Wolf or a Tasmanian Tiger. But it is not a wolf or a tiger or indeed anything most people are familiar with. It is a marsupial. As such, it is no closer to a wolf or tiger than it is to a horse, a whale, a bat, a mouse or a human being. It is more closely related to kangaroos and koalas. Its scientific name means 'pouch-wolf with a dog head'. And it is (very very probably) extinct. The thylacine was the largest marsupial predator to survive to be reliably seen and documented by Europeans. While by that time it was confined to Tasmania, it used to range over the mainland of Australia also, as well as the great island of New Guinea, where it likely went extinct as a result of contact with humans and the dogs they brought along, the dingoes. In earlier times there were even larger predators in Australia, most notably the Marsupial Lion, Thylacoleo (which I hope to feature here soon), but these have been extinct for some thousands of years. The thylacine only went extinct in the mid-twentieth Century. There are still reports of it being sighted, but these are close in credibility to Bigfoot sightings …

Looking at a thylacine, it's not that remarkable, looking very much like a dog or wolf indeed. It reached the size of a medium-large dog, males attaining a bodyweight of about 20 kg/44 lbs, females slightly less. It stood about 60 cm/24" at the shoulder. Its body colour ranged from light fawn to a darker brown. Its fur was short, soft and dense. Its stripes were confined to its mid-back and hindquarters, and gave it a tiger-like appearance. The tail was long, stout and stiff, rather like that of a kangaroo. It could open its jaws unusually wide. It had a rather stiff-legged gait, and couldn't run very fast. There are reports of it hopping on its hind legs like a kangaroo. It could make various sounds: growl, hiss, bark, whine and a low snuffling noise. It is remarkable among even the marsupials for the strange fact that not only did the female have a pouch, opening to the rear, in which she could keep her babies while they were very young, but the male had a pouch as well. It of course didn't produce babies, but the pouch seems to have been a protective sheath for its genitals.

Thylacines were well-known to Aboriginal Australians and Tasmanians, who had numerous names of their own for them. They were depicted in rock art in Australia, dating back to at least three thousand years ago. Europeans encountered them in the late eighteenth Century, and the first scientific description of them was published in 1808. At first they were considered very close to the American Opossum, another marsupial. Later it was discovered that, like all Australian marsupials, they were not particularly closely related to the opossums of the New World. Today they're considered most closely related to Tasmanian devils, the strange ant-eating Numbats, and the cat-like Quolls. They come from a long line of evolution: the species itself is reckoned to have appeared 2 million years ago, and as mentioned, having spread through the mainland of Australia as well as to the islands of New Guinea and Tasmania. Think about that … how long this animal successfully survived, only to be destroyed and hunted to extinction within a few short centuries. In prehistory, there were several other kinds of thylacine. They formed their own family, the Thylacinidae. At least twelve different species are known from fossils, in eight genera. They included species that ranged from quite small, under 10 kg, to the size of a wolf.

Very versatile predators, thylacines ranged through numerous different habitats, from grassy plains to open eucalypt forests. On Tasmania, they inhabited woodlands in the island interior, and heathlands along the coast. Their stripes could give them camouflage by breaking the outline of their bodies, or blend in with vertical stalks of grass. But likely they could also recognize each other by the exact stripe pattern of each individual. By the time the British encountered them, they were mainly nocturnal in activity, hunting in the dark or in the early hours of dawn or at dusk. It is perhaps because of contact with humans that they showed this pattern of activity, and perhaps during their heyday they hunted more during the day. Alas, we can't say for sure. We only observed them in their final years, during which they were very secretive and hid in their dens in the forests during the daytime.

Like other marsupials, thylacines gave birth to very small and undeveloped young, called joeys, up to four at a time. There are 11 remaining specimens of young, pouch-aged thylacine joeys, the study of which gave us what data we have about their development. At birth, the joeys crawled into their mother's pouch, there latching onto a teat where they remained as milk was pumped into them. They slowly developed in the pouch over three months. Then, open-eyed and about half full-size, they were ejected. They could still crawl into the pouch for protection and for suckling for a while longer. Mostly, they would stay in the den as their mother went out to hunt. We don't know much more about them. Thylacines likely had a life expectation of 5-7 years in the wild.

We also don't know much about what animals the thylacines hunted, or how. They're thought to have preyed on animals up to the size of kangaroos and emus, but a recent study suggested their jaws to be surprisingly weak, limiting them to prey of about 5 kg/11 lbs or less. But that study may have been flawed. Whatever the case, thylacines likely were not important threats to the sheep of human farmers … but they were perceived as such. There even was a myth that they drank mainly blood.

It was the thylacine's undeserved reputation as a sheep-killer (and perhaps more deservingly, a killer of poultry) that sealed its fate in Tasmania. Starting in 1830, the Van Diemen's Land Company, and later the Tasmanian government, paid bounties for dead thylacines. Over two thousand bounties were paid, but likely many more thylacines were killed.

But it's not only direct persecution that led to the thylacine's demise. It also suffered because of habitat destruction. That is to say, humans destroyed the forests that were its home, to make way for farms and human settlements. Its prey animals also decreased as a result of this. Lastly it seems that as today with the Tasmanian devils, thylacines also were ravaged by an epidemic disease, in its case similar to canine distemper. As a result of all of this, their numbers dwindled, and the last confirmed kill was in 1930. A final thylacine lived in the Hobart Zoo from the early thirties until its death in 1936. Today there are numerous photos, and some short video clips, of zoo thylacines; this is the only remaining visual documentation of living animals. In 1936, the Tasmanian government declared the species to be officially protected. But that appears to have been much too late; no surviving living wild animals had been seen for years. There were searches and surveys trying to find them, with only a few likely records, most recently in the 1960's, but nothing concrete. In 1982, fifty years after the last confirmed sighting in the wild, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature declared the thylacine to be extinct.

The End … or Is It?

The story doesn't quite end there. There have been and continue to be tantalising reports of thylacine sightings, not just in Tasmania, but even on the mainland of Australia. Some of these are even accompanied by photographic evidence. But with all of this, there's nothing definitive; everything is ambiguous. No body, or part of body, no incontrovertible and clear photo, not even a good shot or cast of a thylacine footprint. In fact, searching for living thylacines is today considered not a scientific pursuit, but a cryptozoological one. Cryptozoology is the search for highly dubious creatures, like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, and has almost zero scientific credibility.

Finally, and perhaps a bit more scientific-respectably (though not by much), there is the possibility of bringing thylacines back through genetic engineering. The surviving thylacine specimens might conceivably yield enough DNA to allow us to use various genetic technologies to clone into a living animal. But this, given the present-day state of the art, is still hardly feasible, and there are also serious ethical considerations regarding the advisability of such a project.

Willem

18.01.21 Front Page

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