Thylacine

Fascinating facts about the Thylacine

• The last thylacine died in captivity on 7 September 1936 — a male named Benjamin in Hobart Zoo — making it the most recent large mammal carnivore to vanish from Earth. Yet for 2 million years before that, this marsupial hunted across Australia with a bite force of 180 newtons, strong enough to crush bone. Humans arrived 65,000 years ago. Dingoes arrived 5,000 years ago. The thylacine was gone in just 100 years of European settlement — a collapse faster than any documented mammal extinction.
• A thylacine could open its jaw to 120 degrees, wider than any living mammal except the hippopotamus, to swallow prey whole or tear through hide and bone in one bite. But this wasn't a apex predator's weapon — thylacines weighed only 20–30 kg and hunted solo, stalking rabbits, wallabies, and small marsupials through scrub at dawn and dusk. That enormous gape was built for a hunter that worked alone and needed every evolutionary advantage to survive.
• Thylacines had no uterus — they carried their young in a backward-facing pouch like all marsupials, but the reproductive machinery was fundamentally different from placental carnivores. This 160-million-year-old marsupial design meant smaller litters (usually 2–4 pups) and faster development, but it also meant they could never match the breeding speed of introduced rabbits and foxes. Evolution built them for a world that no longer existed by the time Europeans arrived.
• Eyewitness accounts describe thylacines making guttural coughs, hisses, and yaps — never true barks or howls — but no sound recordings were ever made. The last photographs of a living thylacine were taken in 1928, twelve years before extinction, and the last film footage in 1933 shows a pacing animal in a zoo enclosure. We have no audio record of what a wild thylacine sounded like, only silence where its voice should be.
• Bounty hunters killed thylacines for just £1 per scalp in the 1880s–1920s, with over 2,000 killed in a single decade in Tasmania alone. Yet the real extinction driver was likely habitat loss and competition from dingoes and foxes after humans arrived 65,000 years ago — the thylacine was already gone from mainland Australia for 3,000 years before Europeans even set foot there. It was a slow erasure accelerated at the end, not a sudden wipeout.

At a glance

About the Thylacine

In the twilight depths of the Tasmanian wilderness, the thylacine once prowled, a phantom-like predator with eyes that shone like lanterns in the dark, its stiff gait and rigid tail a testament to its unique, if ill-fated, place in the natural world. As it moved through the forest, its distinctive thirteen horizontal stripes seemed to ripple and flex, like the shadows themselves come to life, a fleeting glimpse of a creature that was both familiar and yet, utterly alien. Its extinction a poignant reminder of the fragility of life, the thylacine remains an enigmatic and haunting presence, a ghostly apparition that continues to captivate our imagination.

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