The Death
of a
Species

How Tasmania's Marsupial Wolf Became Extinct

By Scott Weidensaul

The thylacine certainly isn't a newcomer to controversy--from almost the first moment that Europeans encountered this marsupial predator, they weren't quite sure what to make of it. When Dutch mariner Abel Tasman stumbled on what he called "Van Dieman's Land" in 1642, his crew reported that, "They saw the footing [tracks] of wild beasts having claws like a Tyger." Members of a French expedition wrote of seeing "a big dog" when they stopped in Tasmania in 1792.

Most of what we know about the thylacine comes from the reports of trappers, sheep-growers, and the few naturalists who had first-hand contact with it in the 19th century, after English settlement. Some who lived in tiger country swore there were really two species--"bulldogs" with stout, heavily muscled jaws, and "greyhounds" that were slimmer and had more tapered muzzles. This was actually a sexual difference, though adding to the confusion was the fact that male thylacines had a "pseudopouch" that protected the testes, similar in appearance to the one a female used for carrying her young. All in all, everyone agreed, it was a decidedly odd beast.

Although once found across mainland Australia and New Guinea, the thylacine apparently lost out to dingoes, once they were introduced to the continent from Asia around 3,500 years ago. But dingoes never made it to Tasmania, and when the first British settlers arrived in 1803, they found the thylacine sitting at the apex of the terrestrial food chain--and did everything they could to dethrone it. The very first load of colonists brought with them an animal that would prove central to Tasmania's new economy, the sheep. Wool-growing operations like the vast Van Dieman's Land Company sprang up, converting gum forests to pastures and moving large numbers of sheep into the native buttongrass meadows in the mountains.

The thylacine quickly became a target of sheep-growers' ire. Starting in the 1830s and lasting for almost 90 years, the Van Dieman's company offered a private bounty for "native hyenas," and pressure from stock-owners forced the government to follow suit with its own bounty scheme beginning in 1887. (Evidence in the historical record that the animals really killed large numbers of sheep is scarce, and some modern experts think the thylacines were a convenient scapegoat for incompetent ranch managers.) The coup de grace, however, may have been microbial--an unknown disease, probably introduced from abroad, that swept through Tasmania in the 1890s, decimating not only the thylacine but other marsupial predators such as quolls, a catlike hunter. Weakened and disoriented thylacines were easily snared and shot, and their population went into a final, fatal tailspin, ending in the death of the last known animal in a Tasmanian zoo in 1936.