Australia's Tasmanian Tiger May Live Again
5/14/99
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Title: Australia's Tasmanian Tiger May Live Again
Source: Reuters Limited
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: May 14, 1999
Byline: Jane Nelson
CANBERRA - Australia's Tasmanian Tiger, a marsupial wolf believed to
be extinct, may be reborn in only a few years with geneticists
cloning it from perfectly preserved baby "tigers" kept in museums.
Australian Museum director Mike Archer said the discovery of a baby
"tiger" preserved in a jar in his Sydney museum had encouraged him
over the past year to investigate the possibility of bringing the
wolf back to life using its DNA.
His Jurassic Park-style plan was reinforced on Thursday when six
other baby Tasmanian Tigers, also known as the thylacine, were
revealed in other museums, meaning a greater gene pool could be used
and boosting the animal's chances of future survival.
"I've found out that there's a total of seven thylacines around the
world, so this isn't the only one -- there's a population waiting to
be kickstarted," Archer told Reuters.
"There's been several geneticists who are now saying it's not a joke,
it's not silly, it could be done."
La Trobe University's senior lecturer in genetics, Mike Westerman,
said it was possible the thylacine could be cloned in the "not-too-
distant future" if the funds were available. Archer said he was
prepared to hand the baby "tiger" over to anyone with a serious
cloning proposal.
Sydney's pouch-young thylacine was plonked into its jar in 1866 and
was preserved in alcohol rather than formalin, which would have
destroyed its DNA.
There were thylacines stored in alcohol in the British Museum in
London and in American museums as well as several in a museum in
Australia's island state, Tasmania.
Archer said he had previously thought it feasible that Tasmanian
Tigers, which grew to about two metres (six feet) long including a
long rigid tail, and have tapering stripes on their bodies, could be
sold as pets within 50 years.
But some geneticists had suggested it may happen in only a few years.
"The important thing is it's not a question of if, it's a question of
when," he said.
Australia had a moral duty to revive the Tasmanian Tiger, which
looked similar to a wild dog, after early British settlers in
Tasmania mercilessly hunted it down to stop it killing flocks of
sheep, he said.
The last known Tasmanian Tiger was captured in 1933 and died in a zoo
in the Tasmanian capital of Hobart in 1936. There have been numerous
reported sightings of apparent thylacines since then in both Tasmania
and on the mainland, but no evidence has ever been found to prove
they still existed.
Thylacines once roamed the Australian mainland and New Guinea but are
thought to have lost out in competition with the wild dogs introduced
by man into both places thousands of years ago and to have become
extinct long before white settlement.