Film of a Now Extinct Australian Mammal

Опубликовано: 11 Февраль 2017
на канале: John Hall

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The very last Thylacine or marsupial Tasmanian Tiger died in Hobart Zoo in 1936.

And what makes this even more galling is the fact that there's the fair amount of film footage of this now extinct large mammal - taken between 1912 and 1932. Mainly at Beaumaris Zoo (later Hobart Zoo) and at London Zoo.

Animals caught in the wild were usually sold to zoos, like this mother and her three pups (seen in photographs in the video) who were trapped by Walter Jack Mullins at Tyenna in the Florentine Valley in southern Tasmania in February 1924 and then sold to Hobart Zoo. It's very probable that the very last thylacine was one of the pups in this litter.

This footage was taken in Beaumaris Zoo, Hobart, Tasmania in 1932 and shows the last thylacine prowling its cage and also demonstrating its enormous jaw extension.

There have been countless searches over the decades in more and more remote places for any last surviving tigers - to assuage our collective guilt in this extinction. But of course, nada!

In a further and latter day guilt-reduction exercise, there's a pretty big effort on at the moment to extract DNA from a female infant preserved in alcohol in 1866 to implant it in the egg of (perhaps) a Tasmanian Devil host and ... well, you know the rest.

Hopefully people have learned the lesson ... what do you think?