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Don was undaunted. “There's also habitat that would be suitable in other areas of the country,” he said. In other words, reintroducing the thylacine onto the Australian mainland was a possibility.

“Near Sydney?”

“Well, the Blue Mountains would be fine.”

“Maybe they could move in with the flying foxes in the botanical gardens,” Alexis chimed in. Alexis was more comfortable with blurring boundaries than most people. In one of his paintings, Rat Evolution, an everyday rat was transformed over a series of three mutations into a freakish species of the future, a furless, kangaroo-like beast with armor-plated hindquarters and six-inch-long incisors. Perhaps the Evolutionary Biology Unit would want to look into making those superpowered dingofighting tigers after all.

We only had one more question: “Do you think there's any possibility that the tiger isn't extinct?”

Karen laughed. “Some people still swear they see them.”

Don took it more seriously.

“I'm presuming it's extinct,” he said carefully.

“What about the people who believe the tiger's still out there?”

He paused. “Let's hope it is.”

We knew he didn't believe it for a second. But it was a happy thought. If nothing else, it would make his job a whole lot easier.

4. THE EXTINCTION CABINET

Before we met Don Colgan, we had been pondering the nature of life. Now we were wondering, what exactly was death? Such thoughts were driven sharply to the surface as Don led us through the museum's osteology exhibit. In it were scores of articulated skeletons, their bones blanched white. The sinuous vertebrae of a python were poised to strike, a furless fur seal hung from the ceiling suspended by wires, and a swan posed with its featherless wings outstretched. Beneath a sampler that read “Home Sweet Home,” a human skeleton sat in a rocking chair powered by an invisible motor.

Next to the scrawny remains of a rat darting into a mouse hole, a hidden door led to the museum's basement collections. We walked down a steep staircase and into a hallway, passing a metal cart crammed with jars containing pickled bats and taxidermies of an echidna and mountain brushtail possum. The whole area smelled funereal, a combination of mothballs, alcohol, and formaldehyde used to preserve the old specimens. In front of a stiff mounted wombat, Don passed us off to Sandy Ingleby, the Australian Museum's curator of mammals. She was the custodian of the dead objects that contained the tiger's life code.

“Cute wombat,” Alexis said, pointing at the taxidermy.

Sandy laughed and flicked her flaming red hair. We noticed she lacked the semi-embalmed look of other specimen curators we had met. As she took us past the rows of mint green metal cabinets that held her lifeless charges, we caught a few of the labels: kangaroos, sugar gliders, quolls. All together, Sandy said, there were 41,300 specimens in the Australian Museum's mammal collection. Next to a tall, padlocked cabinet set slightly apart from the rest, we saw a photograph of a Tasmanian tiger with three half-grown pups backed into the corner of a wooden enclosure. With their wide eyes, they looked both wary and vulnerable. The photograph was taken in 1924.

“I call this my exhibit of extinct mammal specimens,” Sandy said, unlocking the cabinet. Inside, sliding trays were jammed with pelts, skulls, taxidermy, and boxes and jars containing body parts—each neatly numbered and labeled. Sandy reeled off some of the names of the dead: the Tasmanian tiger, the Toolache wallaby, the desert bandicoot, the broadfaced potoroo, the lesser bilby, the Darling Downs hopping mouse.

Though nearly two dozen animals were represented, half the space was devoted to the remains of the thylacine, totaling fifty-seven items. Sandy pulled out a tray and showed us the flattened, tanned pelt of a tiger. Its head was wolflike, the triangular ears crumpled with age, its eyeless sockets staring up at us. To say these objects were rare was an understatement. “They're not making any more of these,” Sandy pointed out. “At least not that we know of.”