How ‘putrid’ pickled skull found in a cupboard could be key to reviving famous extinct beast that vanished 100-years-ago
A PICKLED skull found in a cupboard could lead to the revival of a famous extinct beast that vanished 100 years ago.
Inside a hidden bucket at a Melbourne museum was the well-preserved head of the extinct Tasmanian tiger, otherwise known as a Thylacinus.
The final living beast died in a Hobart zoo in 1936 after the other living tiger’s had been hunted to the point of extinction.
This was in an attempt to protect Tasmania’s growing livestock industry.
But after a skull being found in the back of a cupboard, the animal could be the ideal candidate for “de-extinction”.
Colossal Biosciences have previously announced plans to use the latest gene editing and reproductive biology techniques to bring back animals that haven’t walked Earth for thousands of years.
But most attempts to reconstruct the genetic code of extinct species have proved to be been unsuccessful due to the fragility of DNA.
The 110-year-old Tasmanian tiger head however was skinned and preserved in ethanol – enabling researchers to piece together most of its DNA sequence and strands of RNA.
The new genome is reportedly of similar size to a human genome – with 3 billion base pairs of nucleotides.
But 45 gaps still remain in the DNA sequence which scientists hope to close in the future with more sequencing, Live Science reports.
Fragments of the RNA from the pickled head helped researchers to detect genes that were switched on in different tissues when the tiger was alive.
This gives experts knowledge on what the animal could taste, smell and see – as well as how the brain functioned.
And as RNA is less prone to damage compared to DNA, its preservation helps experts understand the beast and its biology better.
Despite this, having the Tasmanian tiger’s genes is only one step in a long road to resurrect the beast.
Critics have argued that companies like Colossus are trying to live out “fairy tale science” through de-extinction and claim it’s unethical.
But others say that de-extinction research does no damage and helps to advance understanding of long-extinct species.
Professor Andrew Pask, whose team helped assemble the Tasmanian tiger genome, said: “It was literally a head in a bucket of ethanol in the back of a cupboard that had just been dumped there with all the skin removed, and been sitting there for about 110 years.
“It was pretty putrid, a completely gruesome sight. People had chopped large chunks off it.
“This was the miracle that happened with this specimen. It blew my mind.”
In 2022, Colossal announced a partnership with an Australian lab that pledged to de-extinct the thylacine and reintroduce it to the wild.
So far, this project has proven more feasible than reviving the woolly mammoth.
Marsupials are also born halfway through mammal embryogenesis, with development finishing in the mother’s pouch.
In contrast to the months a mammoth must spend in the uterus, the thylacine only needs a few weeks.
What was a Tasmanian tiger?
- Thylacines were large carnivorous marsupials which looked like a cross between a wolf and a big cat.
- The slow-moving predators hunted kangaroos as well as other marsupials, rodents and small birds.
- The long, lanky marsupial had several signatures including a thin tail, striped lower back, and narrow snout.
- They once lived throughout Australia but became extinct on the mainland around 2,000 years ago.
- It was then confined to the island of Tasmania until they were eventually killed off by dogs and hunters.