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For insurance purposes, the pickled pouch pup was valued at $1.5 million. And the staff couldn't be too careful with an object as rare as this one. In fact, there had been a rash of thefts at the museum in previous years. They had been inside jobs, too, with hundreds of specimens going missing, including an entire stuffed gorilla.

Given the security procedures involved in opening the safe, we were surprised when they finally opened the door. We had expected a high-tech facility with a subzero refrigerator and elaborate temperature controls. It looked more like a large broom closet. And the paint was peeling.

Alexis frowned. “Where do they keep the pouch pup?”

“It's in a bucket.”

After a moment of rummaging, Sandy pulled out a white janitor's pail and put it on top of an antique safe that looked like it had come off the set of a Wild West movie. The bucket was heavily padded with foam rubber.

“This is the type of specimen jar they used during the 1800s and early 1900s,” she said, lifting out an eighteen-inch-high glass container filled with fluid. When we saw what was inside, we forgot about the peeling paint.

Immersed in liquid and curled up as if resting in its mother's pouch was the body of a Tasmanian tiger pup. The fur was palest gold, with brown whispers of stripes across the back and flanks. Its eyes were closed as if sleeping, and its right paw was tucked under its chin. We could see tiny sharp claws emerging from the paws and delicate whiskers floating in front of the muzzle. The tail was curved around the feet, and tiny, triangular ears lay against its blocky, outsized head. Spreading across the length of its short snout was a familiar grin. A white card taped to the jar read: “UJuvenile. Coll. Masters, 1866 from Tasmania.” It had been floating in alcohol for nearly 140 years.

If the pouch pup's digs weren't as posh as they might be, Sandy said we should have seen how it was stored before. For decades, the pouch pup was kept in the museum's “spirit house,” hidden among jars of kangaroo kidneys, monkeys, fetuses, and the brains of whales, all preserved in ethanol. “It wasn't even locked up. The spirit house was actually open from the street at one stage, so you could just walk right in there.” When Sandy took over the mammal collection in 1996, she helped move the marinated tiger pup inside the museum, down to the basement, and under lock and key.

We looked at the white card attached to the jar again. “What does ‘Coll. Masters’ mean?”

“George Masters was employed as the museum's collector. He went to Tasmania in the 1800s and captured wildlife and sent it back to the museum.” She said there were no details about how Masters acquired the pup. Almost certainly it had been captured and killed along with its mother.

We turned the jar halfway around and saw that the pup's belly had been slit open. “What's that?”

“Masters probably did that in the field when he collected it. If you put a whole animal like that into spirit, the spirit will only penetrate the outer surface and the internal organs will rot. So he slit it open to let the preservative go in.”

When this thylacine was first born it was less than an inch long— undeveloped, weak, defenseless. At that tiny size, it had to crawl across its mother's belly, clinging to her fur, and find its way into her backwardfacing pouch. There, the pup would have lived attached to a teat, until it was old enough to be left alone in a den while the mother went hunting. The pouch pup preserved in the bottle was probably at that stage, still reliant on its mother, but big enough to leave the pouch.

“We estimate it's three months old,” said Sandy. But no one could say for sure. Thylacines had never been bred in captivity. No scientific observations of thylacines were ever made in the wild. Everything that was surmised about their development was based on studies of other distantly related marsupial carnivores.

We thought back to the thylacine skin Sandy had shown us in