Thylacine

The thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) was the largest carnivorous marsupial to survive into modern times — a dog-sized predator distinguished by 13 to 21 dark stripes across its lower back and tail, which earned it the names Tasmanian tiger and Tasmanian wolf. Despite the canine resemblance, it was a marsupial, more closely related to kangaroos and Tasmanian devils than to any placental dog, and it carried its young in a backward-opening pouch. By the time of European settlement it survived only on the island of Tasmania, having vanished from mainland Australia and New Guinea thousands of years earlier.

Its disappearance from the mainland is generally attributed to a combination of competition with the dingo, growing human populations, and climatic shifts in the late Holocene; the most recent mainland remains are roughly 3,000 years old. On Tasmania, which the dingo never reached, the thylacine endured into the twentieth century, only to collapse with extraordinary speed once it was framed as a threat to colonial sheep flocks.

From the 1830s onward, private companies and then the government placed bounties on the animal. The Tasmanian Parliament approved a government bounty in 1888 that paid £1 per adult scalp (and ten shillings per juvenile), and over roughly two decades the scheme paid out on more than 2,000 animals. Combined with habitat loss, competition with introduced dogs, and a probable distemper-like disease that swept the population around 1900–1910, this persecution drove the species to the brink.

The last known thylacine died in captivity at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart on the night of 7 September 1936 — fewer than two months after the species had finally been granted legal protection. No confirmed living specimen has been documented since, though unverified sightings have persisted for decades, and the species has become a focus of de-extinction interest in the twenty-first century.