Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [20]
The thylacine's story was a little bit different. By the time Europeans arrived in Australia, thylacines survived only in Tasmania. In this last oasis, there was only one reason the tiger began to vanish. Sandy pointed to a ragged hole in the top of a taxidermy specimen's head. “I suspect that's a bullet hole,” she said. “They probably caught the animal in a trap and then shot it at close range.”
Most of Australia's mammal extinctions had resulted from “collateral damage.” They had not been intentional, but the result of poor land use and a thoughtless grab for resources. But thylacines were purposely exterminated. From a twenty-first-century perspective, it was hard to believe people had been so foolish, so wasteful, so disregarding of the thylacine's biological uniqueness, its beauty. It was also hard to accept that such an ancient species could be snuffed out so quickly. Wasn't it possible thylacines had resources the hunters knew nothing about: places to hide, strategies of cunning and avoidance? It was these niggling doubts that kept the tiger's status unresolved. So many people believed—or hoped— it would still be found one day that it was trapped in a state of limbo. We conjured up an image of the thylacine ferrying forever between life and death in the River Styx, but never quite reaching either shore.
We asked Sandy why she thought the extinction of the thylacine was so hard to accept.
“It's such a tragic story,” she said. “And it's so recent, isn't it?”
Was there any chance that a few Tasmanian tigers had eluded the traps and guns—that the moment of extinction had not yet arrived? Sandy said that a few Australian animals had, in fact, made it back across the River Styx. After disappearing in 1909, Leadbeater's possum was rediscovered in 1961. It lived in communal nests with up to eight possums and remained extremely rare, living in a small area of old-growth forest in Eastern Victoria. The Central rock rat, a desert species with a fat carroty tail that weighed only a few ounces, had been missing for twenty-five years when it was rediscovered in 1996. A few isolated populations clung to survival on a forty-eight-mile strip of land in Australia's Northern Territory. In 1989, the mahogany glider, a big brown-eyed possum with a black stripe that runs from the tip of its nose to the end of its tail and which sails through the air on a parachute-like gliding membrane, was rediscovered after an absence of more than a hundred years. It was immediately declared an endangered species.
Could this happen with the thylacine, too? Would it be found inhabiting an isolated pocket in Tasmania's hard-to-reach backcountry? Sandy didn't think so. For every rediscovered animal in the cabinet—for every one that had received a pardon—there were five that had vanished, most likely irrevocably. Plus, she said, the few Australian animals that had been rediscovered were all on the small side. “Something as large as the tiger would be hard to miss,” she said.
For big animals like the Tasmanian tiger, the River Styx is wider, deeper, choppier—easier to get lost in. As far as the Australian Museum was concerned, cloning was the only hope for the tiger. And if Don and Karen were successful, future searches for the thylacine would be rendered a moot point.
Sandy said the specimen that had inspired the cloning project—the rare intact pouch pup—was kept in an area even more secure than the extinction cabinet. She led us back down the hallway and stopped in front of a steel metal door. Behind it was a room-sized safe. Two people were required to open it: One museum official had the safe's combination