Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [19]
The fur of the tiger pelt was ginger-colored (a mixture of brown, wheat, and gold). Broad chocolate brown stripes cut across the back, tapering to a point on the lower flanks. Each stripe was different, like a ragged brushstroke.
“Can we touch it?”
“Go ahead.”
We ran our fingers lightly down the stripes. The fur felt rough, slightly bristly. We wondered if it had felt softer in life.
Sandy lifted up a female specimen and pointed out the pouch on its pale belly. It was a scooplike indentation just beneath the tail. “The thylacine pouch is round and rearward-facing, because it's an animal on all fours,” she said. Unlike a kangaroo, whose pouch opens forward and up, the thylacine pouch faced backward, so that mother tigers could run through the bush without injuring their pups. Inside the pouch, Sandy showed us that one of the dead thylacine's four teats was enlarged. The animal had been suckling a pup when it was killed.
Wearing white cotton gloves, Sandy assembled a still life of tiger remains on a long table, laying out two skulls, an articulated skeleton, a tiger brain in a jar of yellow-green liquid, and a skin.
For some people, being around preserved body parts, bones, and pickled organs might be uncomfortable. Not Alexis. He was like Norman Bates at a taxidermy blowout sale, rearranging the body bits and pieces, posing them for photographs. He fingered the heavy, elongated skulls, opening and closing the jaws to re-create the tiger's famous 120-degree gape. Their inch-long, inward-curving fangs were backed up by rows of knife-sharp teeth.
Sandy didn't seem to think there was anything strange about Alexis's fascination. She pulled out a taxidermy of a tiger—a skin mounted on a frame, with glass eyes inserted into the head. It wasn't very good. The tiger looked like it had died of a hangover—it was bug-eyed, cringing, and posed unnaturally in mid-crouch. A patch of hair below the neck had come off. We could never have fallen in love with this sad creature.
“What a hack job,” said Alexis.
Sandy agreed. “The mounting is of pretty low quality. It's fairly Eurocentric, very placental mammal rather than marsupial.”
“Looks like it's part mongoose,” Alexis added.
When Alexis had finished probing and critiquing the tiger remains, Sandy led us back to the extinction cabinet. None of the other animals inside were as well-known as the thylacine, but each had its own long history and expiration date.
The Eastern hare wallaby was a small kangaroo with a face like a rabbit and reputedly could jump over a horse—last confirmed sighting 1890.
The Toolache was a plump, four-foot-tall wallaby with a black stripe on its muzzle—last seen 1937.
The crescent nailtail wallaby was a golden brown hopper with enormous ears—last seen early 1960s.
The broad-faced potoroo was a tiny hunchbacked kangaroo that dined primarily on truffles—last seen 1875.
The lesser bilby was a needle-nosed burrower, with rabbit ears and a bottlebrush tail—last confirmed sighting 1931.
The pig-footed bandicoot was a small, plump creature with a narrow snout, long skinny legs, and delicate hooflike feet—last confirmed sighting 1907.
Most of these extinct animals had never been photographed. Their likenesses survived only in artists' watercolors. This cabinet contained all that was left of them—and sometimes all that remained was a skull. If the cloning of extinct species ever became a reality, there would be plenty to rectify.
Ever since Europeans arrived in Australia, mammals have been disappearing at an astonishing rate. “Australia has the unfortunate distinction of being the continent in which the most mammal species have become extinct over the last two hundred years,” said Sandy. Nearly half of all the modern-day mammal extinctions worldwide have been from Australia— totaling nineteen species.
What caused all these extinctions? Sandy said certain factors came into play repeatedly in Australia. For starters, Europeans didn't arrive on the continent alone. They brought pets and other hangers-on with them and introduced them into the