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Extinct Tasmanian tiger's 'snap' unlike any living mammal's bite
Hunters wiped out thylacines, commonly known as Tasmanian tigers, in Australia nearly a century ago. But a myth about these shy, semi-nocturnal predators may have been behind the species’ extinction.
Thylacines had a strong resemblance to wolves — so much so that they were given the species name cynocephalus, meaning “dog-head.” Along with the physical likeness came the assumption that the animals posed a similar threat to livestock. Now, new research shows that Tasmanian tigers had specialized feeding adaptations that likely prevented them from hunting the livestock they were accused of attacking.
“The mostly British colonists of Tasmania tended to view unfamiliar wildlife as primitive copies of more familiar European species,” said Dr. Vera Weisbecker, lead author of a study published Monday in the journal Nature Communications, in an email. “Thylacines reminded them of wolves, so they decided that thylacines were a danger to livestock and put a bounty on its head.”
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Thylacines disappeared about 2,000 years ago everywhere except the Australian island of Tasmania, according to the National Museum of Australia. When settlers began establishing sheep and cattle farms there in the 1800s, they exterminated the distinctively striped thylacines, blaming them for livestock losses that were actually due to feral dogs and human mismanagement.
The last thylacine living in captivity died from exposure in 1936 at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Tasmania — shortly after the Tasmanian government belatedly granted the species protected status.
A new analysis of thylacine skulls highlights just how different Tasmanian tigers were from wolves — or any other living carnivorous mammal. A unique combination of skull and jaw features suggests they hunted small, rabbit-size prey rather than larger animals such as sheep.
“Thylacines were in fact more closely related to kangaroos than to dogs,” said Weisbecker, professor of evolutionary biology at Flinders University in Australia. “They were marsupials whose ancestors separated from the other mammals long before the dinosaurs went extinct.”
The findings add to growing evidence that Tasmanian tigers were quite different from initial assumptions — and reveal the complexities of trying to understand an extinct species.
While scanning a dataset she had already published, Weisbecker noticed unusually large skull measurements and worried she had made an error.