Tyger, tyger, burnt out - Australian Heritage Magazine

Tyger, tyger, burnt out 

The demise of the thylacine 

The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, has acquired almost mythical status since it was hunted to extinction last 

century. Once widespread across Tasmania, the Australian continent and New Guinea, the thylacine seems 

to have been quite susceptible to changes in its habitat, and its fate was sealed when European settlers 

decided that it posed an unacceptable threat to their sheep. 

BY MARK KELLETT 

TALES OF STRANGE 

carnivorous beasts lurking in 

the forests of Van Diemen’s 

Land had been told since 

the visit of the Dutch explorer, Abel 

Tasman, in 1642. His pilot-major, 

Francoys Jacobz, had led a shore party 

on the 2nd of December and 

described finding “the footing of wild 

beasts having claws like a tiger”. 

However, his report, as with many 

others of strange tracks and halfglimpsed 

animals that followed it, is 

so vague that modern readers cannot 

be certain what animal is being 

described (wombats, for example, 

have such long claws). 

On the 21st of April, 1805, the 

Sydney Gazette printed a report of a 

strange animal found near the shortlived 

settlement at Yorktown on Port 

Dalrymple in the north of the island. 

An animal of a truly singular and 

novel description was killed by dogs 

on the 30th of March on a hill 

immediately contiguous to the 

settlement. From the following 

minute description of which, by 

Lieutenant Governor PATERSON, it 

must be considered of a species 

perfectly distinct from any of the 

animal creation hitherto known, and 

certainly the only powerful and 

terrific of the carnivorous and 

voracious tribe yet discovered on any 

part of New Holland or its adjacent 

islands. 

Paterson’s detailed description is the 

first indisputable account of an animal 

PICTURE ABOVE: Male and female of the 

Thylacinus cynocephalus. (1841), H. C. 

Richter. From Mammals of Australia by John 

Gould (1804–1881). Even at this early 

date, Gould was pessimistic about the 

thylacine’s survival. National Library of Australia, 

nla.pic-vn3292764. 

Australian Heritage 73

that was to become despised by, and 

later emblematic of the people of the 

island. 

It is very evident that this species is 

destructive, and lives entirely on 

animal food; as on dissection his 

stomach was found filled with a 

quantity of kangaroo, weighing 5lbs, 

the weight of the whole animal 45lbs. 

From its interior structure it must be 

a brute peculiarly quick of digestion; 

the dimensions were, ... length of the 

eye, which is remarkably large and 

black, 1 3 / 4 inches; ... length of the 

tail, 1 foot 8 inches; length of the 

fore leg 11 inches; and of the fore 

foot, 5 inches; the fore foot with 5 

blunt claws; ... stripes across the back 

20, on the tail 3; 2 of the stripes 

extend down each thigh; length of 

the hind leg from the heel to the 

thigh, 1 foot; length of hind foot, 6 

inches; the hind foot with 4 blunt 

claws, the soles of the feet without 

hair; ... 8 fore teeth in the upper jaw, 

and 6 in the under; 4 grinders of a 

side, in the upper and lower jaw; 3 

single teeth also in each; 4 tusks, or 

canine teeth, length of each 1 inch; 

... the body short hair and smooth, 

of a greyish colour, the stripes 

black; the hair on the neck is 

rather longer than that on 

the body; the hair on the 

ears of a light brown 

colour, on the inside 

rather long. The form 

of the animal is 

that of a hyaena, at 

the same time 

strongly 

reminding the 

observer of the 

appearance of a 

low wolf dog. 

Van Diemen’s 

Land’s first Surveyor- 

General, George Harris, 

officially described the animal in 

1806 on the basis of two male 

specimens that had been caught with 

traps baited with kangaroo-meat. 

Placing it in the same genus as the 

American opossums, he gave it the 

scientific name of Didelphis 

cynocephala (dog-headed opossum). 

The creature he described would 

come to be known by an astonishing 

range of common names, almost all of 

them misleading as to its affinities: 

legunta, dog-faced dasyurus, hyena 

opossum, zebra opossum, Tasmanian 

dingo, pouched wolf, striped wolf, 

Tasmanian wolf, zebra wolf, and 

Tasmanian tiger. In 1824 another 

naturalist, Coenraad Temminck, 

recognised the animal as distinct from 

the American marsupials and gave its 

modern name: Thylacinus cynocephalus 

(pouched and dog-headed), and 

hence thylacine, the common name 

now most often used. 

The thylacine superficially 

resembled a German shepherd dog in 

size and shape. However, while dogs 

are placental mammals, thylacines 

were marsupials related to the 

Tasmanian devil, giving birth to up to 

four young at an early stage of 

development and rearing them in a 

backward-facing pouch. In a process 

called convergent evolution, the 

similar way of life adopted by the 

ancestors of thylacines 

and dogs led to their 

descendants 

developing a 

similar form. 

Zebra, or dog-faced dasyurus. Didelphis 

cynocephala. Harris, James Basire, Georges 

Cuvier, State Library of Tasmania. Clearly the artist 

had not seen the living animal. 

There were other important 

differences between dogs and 

thylacines. Thylacines had a rather 

stiffer spine and tail, shorter legs, and 

feet that were held flatter to the 

ground than dogs of similar size. This 

combination of features gave it a 

different gait, endowing the animal 

with endurance at the expense of 

speed. Certainly dogs seem to have 

easily caught up with them. Perhaps 

misled by the fact that the thylacine’s 

front legs are rather shorter than the 

rear, R M Martin noted in his History 

of Austral-Asia of 1839, “...in running 

it bounds like a kangaroo, though not 

with such speed.” 

The thylacine may have attempted 

to catch its prey in an ambush, but if 

that failed, it would patiently trot 

after its prey. Its persistence was 

notable, as a miner named Oscar 

described in the Mercury in 1882: 

“This native tiger is not swift, and is 

very awkward in turning, but it 

follows the trail by its never-erring 

scent, and in the long run is sure of 

its prey.” 

When the thylacine caught up with 

its prey, usually small kangaroos, 

wallabies, possums, sometimes 

native rodents, bandicoots, birds, 

lizards and even echidnas, its 

jaws and teeth were put to 

work. Its jaw had the largest 

gape of any land mammal and 

could close with great force, as 

the hunter Hugh Mackay related: 

A bull-terrier once set upon a wolf 

and bailed it up in a niche in some 

rocks. There the wolf stood, with its 

back to the wall, turning its head 

from side to side, checking the terrier 

as it tried to butt in from alternate 

and opposite directions. Finally the 

dog came in close and the wolf gave 

one sharp, fox-like bite, tearing 

a piece of the dog’s skull 

clean off and it fell 

with its brain 

protruding, dead. 

Like other 

carnivorous 

marsupials, its fangs 

were oval and suited for 

crushing, while the 

molars were somewhat 

primitive and shaped for 

cutting (dogs, by contrast, have 

slashing canines and a mixture of 

slicing and crushing molars). 

Thylacine teeth are almost unworn, 

supporting records of the marsupial 

delicately picking out the most 

nutritious parts of its prey: the heart, 

lungs, liver, kidneys, and if it was 

really famished, the muscle from the 

inner thighs, leaving the rest for 

scavengers like Tasmanian devils. 

This fussy diet may have led to the 

wholly erroneous belief that the 

thylacine fed on blood, first recorded 

by British scientist Geoffrey Smith in 

1909. This myth doubtless helped to 

make the animal an object of hatred 

and fear. 

Though it is difficult to reconstruct 

the behaviour of an extinct animal, 

some of the most striking differences 

74 Australian Heritage

A rare photograph of one of the last thylacines held in captivity. Like ‘Benjamin’, who was possibly the last member of the species, its end was 

probably a lonely one. 

between thylacines and dogs might 

have been behavioural. It is now 

known that many marsupials have a 

brain two-thirds the size of placental 

mammal of similar size and habit, and 

thylacines were no exception to this. 

This may have been the result of a 

simpler social structure, thylacines 

hunted alone or perhaps as a mated 

pair or as a mother with joeys, while 

dogs form much larger packs. With 

less need to communicate, thylacines 

do not seem to have vocalised much, 

communicating among themselves 

with a muted coughing bark and 

giving a hissing growl when 

antagonised. Ultimately, the 

thylacines smaller brain and simpler 

behaviour may have reduced its 

capacity to adapt to the changes that 

overtook it. 

The thylacine was the last survivor 

of a once successful family. Twelve 

fossil members of the thylacine family 

are described in a recent paper by 

Stephen Wroe, ranging from fox-sized 

to wolf-sized predators, most of which 

lived between 20 million and 8 

million years ago in different parts of 

Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea. 

Over this period, there seem to have 

been between four or five thylacine 

species living at any given time. By 

the time the first Aboriginal people 

arrived some 60,000 years ago, their 

fortunes had waned and only the 

modern thylacine remained. 

Thylacines became extinct in New 

Guinea about 10,000 years ago and in 

mainland Australia about 3,000 years 

ago. Although the causes of these 

extinctions are not known, the 

disappearance of the thylacine in 

Australia coincided with the arrival of 

the first dingos (Canis familiaris). It 

has been suggested that the dingo may 

have competed catastrophically with 

the mainland thylacine for food and 

living space. Though there are 

suggestions that small relic thylacine 

populations may have persisted on the 

mainland, only in Tasmania, isolated 

from the mainland by Bass Strait 

about 12,000 years ago, did it survive 

to be seen by Europeans with 

certainty. 

This isolation ended abruptly in 

1803 when the British colonised Van 

Diemen’s Land in a move to thwart 

any territorial ambitions of the 

French. A year later Hobart Town 

(later Hobart) and Patersonia (later 

Launceston) were founded. Two 

animals that came in the company of 

the settlers were to prove deadly for 

the thylacine. 

In the chaotic conditions of the 

early settlements, some domestic dogs 

escaped and formed feral packs. It is 

possible that such wild dogs attacked 

thylacine; domestic dogs have been 

described as being either terrified or 

enraged by them. Dogs also would 

have competed with thylacines for the 

kangaroos and wallabies that made up 

the bulk of its diet. Ultimately, the 

worst effect of feral dogs on the 

thylacine would turn out to be an 

indirect one. 

In the early Tasmanian settlements, 

sheep were primarily a food supply for 

the colonists, though small numbers of 

wool-producing sheep were on the 

island as early as 1806. With the 

mainland settlements making fortunes 

from wool, significant numbers of 

merino sheep began to arrive in Van 

Diemen’s Land after 1820. There were 

some losses among these early flocks 

and. although it does not seem 

unreasonable that thylacines might 

have been responsible for some of 

them, reports of spree-kills of sheep 

seem more likely to have been the 

work of dogs. However, a series of 

mistaken human acts ensured that the 

thylacine would take the blame. 

By 1819, the Van Diemen’s Land 

flocks were more than twice the size 

of those of the New South Wales 

colonies. Anxious to maintain 

investment in the mainland colony, 

W C Wentworth wrote about a wholly 

imaginary “animal of the panther 

tribe” that “...commits dreadful havoc 

among the flocks.”. Unfortunately, 

this was misconstrued as a description 

of the thylacine, and three years later 

the Surveyor General, George 

William Evans, paraphrased 

Wentworth’s description in the 

Description of Van Diemen’s Land. 

In 1826 the Van Diemen’s Land 

Company was granted extensive 


A more accurate portrayal of the thylacine from The Mammals of Australia,1869, Harriet Scott, Thomas Richards, Victor A Prout, Allport Library and 

Museum of Fine Arts. 

holdings in the north-west of the 

island to farm sheep. However, the 

land was poorly selected and the sheep 

died of exposure or starvation, or were 

taken by predators, human and 

animal, imported and indigenous. 

Ignoring the more serious difficulties, 

the company’s directors seized on the 

wild predators as a problem they could 

solve. In 1830 the company offered 

five shillings for male thylacines and 

seven for females, with half these 

amounts for Tasmanian devils and 

feral dogs, an odd choice, considering 

that the company’s records indicate 

that dogs were responsible for most 

kills. The company offered rewards for 

thylacines on and off until into the 

next century, and other graziers 

followed its example. It seems that 

this bounty-hunting may have only 

reduced thylacine numbers near 

inhabited areas, but did set a 

precedent for how the animal was to 

be dealt with. 

Prophetically, the great naturalist, 

John Gould, suggested in his classic 

Mammals of Australia that the 

thylacine might not be able to 

withstand such persecution 

indefinitely: 

When the comparatively small island 

of Tasmania becomes more densely 

populated, and its primitive forests are 

intersected from the eastern to the 

western coast, the numbers of this 

singular animal will speedily diminish, 

extermination will have its full sway, 

and it will then, like the Wolf in 

England and Scotland, be recorded as 

an animal of the past: although this 

will be a source of much regret, 

neither the shepherd nor the farmer 

can be blamed for wishing to rid the 

island of so troublesome a creature. 

Through the 1880s, the wool 

industry was in crisis, and the colonial 

government was under pressure to 

help the industry. Although a crash in 

the price of wool, drought, disease, 

rabbit plagues and wild dogs were the 

main problems, wealthy farmers’ lobby 

groups like the Buckland and Spring 

Bay Tiger and Eagle Extermination 

Association, the Glamorgan Stock 

Protection Association, the Oatlands- 

Ross Landowners Association and the 

Midlands Stock Protection 

Association agitated for the 

government to take action against the 

thylacine. 

They found their voice in the 

ambitious Tasmanian House of 

Assembly member for Glamorgan, 

John ‘Tiger’ Lyne. In 1886, after citing 

the inflated figure of “...30,000 or 

40,000 sheep were killed annually by 

dingoes”, and arguing that since the 

thylacines were breeding on crown 

land the onus was on the government 

to control them, he proposed £500 be 

set aside each year for the destruction 

of the thylacine, with £1 paid for each 

adult thylacine killed and 10 shillings 

for each pup. In the face of dissent 

about the cost of the proposal, the bill 

was deadlocked. It was only passed 

with the vote of the Speaker of the 

House, Alfred Dobson, an action 

against custom whereby the Speaker is 

expected to vote against such a 

deadlocked bill. The first bounty was 

paid in 1888. Deafness forced Lyne to 

retire from politics in 1893, but 2184 

thylacines were to be killed as a 

consequence of his attempt to seek 

the vote of the woolly aristocracy. 

The task of hunting the thylacine 

fell to ‘tiger men’. The animal’s shy, 

solitary and nocturnal nature made it 

difficult to hunt. Some trapped the 

marsupial with a snare left in a hole in 


a fence or on a forest game trail. 

Others used dogs to track and corner 

the thylacine. 

Tiger men returning from a hunt 

took the carcasses to the local police 

station, where the ears and toes were 

clipped to show that a bounty had 

been paid. Farmers would sometimes 

pay an equivalent bounty for a 

thylacine carcass. The carcass itself 

seems to have been considered useless. 

It has often been said that thousands 

of waistcoats were made of the 

animal’s pelts, but this seems to be 

apocryphal; certainly no such garment 

is known to exist now. A few 

thylacine-skin rugs were made, and a 

rather ghoulish individual made a 

pincushion with a thylacine skull. 

Not everyone applauded the 

slaughter. Like most carnivores, adult 

thylacines were wary of man, but joeys 

taken young enough could be readily 

tamed and trained. In 1842 the 

botanist Ronald Gunn described his 

experience of raising and taming three 

thylacine joeys in the Papers and 

Proceedings of the Royal Society of Van 

Diemen’s Land. He was a rare voice of 

support for the thylacine, asserting “It 

seems far from being a vicious animal 

at its worst, and the name Tiger or 

Hyaena gives a most unjust idea of its 

fierceness.” 

Zoos had also acted to improve the 

thylacine’s reputation. They were kept 

locally in Hobart and Launceston, on 

the mainland in Sydney, Melbourne 

and Adelaide and as far away as 

Britain, Germany, Austro-Hungary, 

America, India and South Africa. 

They were not regarded as very 

glamorous creatures; like most 

carnivores in captivity they were 

rather smelly, and forcing the animal 

to be active during the day made 

them lethargic and stressed. Zoos 

made no direct contribution to the 

conservation of the thylacine, as they 

were not kept in such a way as to 

encourage breeding in captivity, but 

they did act to shift public opinion 

away from the belief that the animal 

was a blood-drinking monster. There 

were tentative calls for its destruction 

to be curbed. 

By this time the animal was in need 

of such protection. Each year the 

bounty was in effect, the government 

was paying for 100 or so thylacines. 

This number halved in 1906 and, 

when the bounty was withdrawn in 

1909, only two bounties had been 

paid. Prices offered by zoos, between 

£7 and £8, had something to do with 

this. But it was also clear that the 

thylacine had undergone an islandwide 

population crash. Its exact cause 

is not known, though contemporary 

reports of thylacines suffering from a 

debilitating disease must be 

considered a possible cause. 

After the Great War it was apparent 

the thylacine was very rare. Prices 

offered by zoos rose again and again, 

London zoo paying £150 for one in 

1926. Scientists and naturalists like 

Thomas Flynn, Professor of Zoology at 

the University of Tasmania, and Clive 

Lord, director of the Tasmanian 

Museum, patiently fought through a 

political smokescreen that the 

thylacine was in no danger and a 

bureaucratic minefield to have the 

thylacine protected. In 1930 they 

succeeded in getting a ban on hunting 

thylacines during their breeding 

season in December and on the 

international traffic in live animals. 

Yet it was still shot for sport or as a 

pest. In the same year a farmer from 

Mawbanna named Wilf Batty, 

incensed by an adult female 

thylacine’s spree in a chicken coop, 

became the last man indisputably to 

have shot a wild thylacine. 

Surprisingly, there is controversy 

about the identity of the last 

thylacine in captivity. The female 

could either have been sold to the zoo 

as a joey by Walter Mullins in 1924 

along with her mother and two littermates, 

or as an adult in 1933 by Elias 

Churchill. It is possible that both are 

true, that when the older thylacine 

died she was discreetly replaced with 

the younger one, as a parent may 

replace a child’s beloved budgie to 

avoid a fuss. 

In 1933 she was visited by David 

Fleay, who had unsuccessfully applied 

for the position of Director of the 

Tasmanian Museum. While in the 

Native Tiger of Tasmania shot by Weaver 1869 (Thylacine), 1869. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. 

One of the few photographs of a thylacine from the 19th century. 


Thylacine: Wilf Batty with animal shot at Mawbanna, 1931. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Note 

the terrified reaction of the dog to Batty’s kill. 

vicinity, he gained the zoo’s 

permission to enter the animal’s 

enclosure and film it. While Fleay was 

arranging the camera, the thylacine 

crept around and bit him on the 

backside. Fleay was more amused than 

angry, and carried the scar proudly for 

the rest of his days. This incident 

produced just over a minute of silent, 

black and white footage that is the 

only film record of the thylacine. 

The last thylacine in captivity died, 

alone and neglected, on the 7th of 

September, 1936. Ironically, she had 

spent the last two months of her life 

as what seems to have been the sole 

representative of a completely 

protected species. Even more 

ironically, as the result of an apparent 

scam by a Geelong resident named 

Frank Darby, she has come to be 

known as Benjamin. 

It took some time for people to 

realise that the thylacine had become 

extinct. Books written as late as the 

1970s either describe the thylacine as 

a living animal or as “possibly 

extinct”. Expeditions were sent out 

over the twentieth century, among 

them one led by Fleay in 1945, with 

their objective gradually changing 

from capturing one for a zoo to 

proving the continued existence of 

the species. However, none of them 

yielded anything other than brief, 

unverifiable sightings and smudged 

prints. 

Proving an animal is extinct, like 

proving any negative, is difficult. A 

rule of thumb commonly accepted 

among biologists is that if there has 

been no indisputable evidence of an 

organism for 50 years, the animal is 

considered extinct. Although there is 

a background noise of sightings in 

Tasmania and even a few on the 

mainland and New Guinea, none are 

accompanied by indisputable 

evidence. When even a recent $1.2 

million reward offered by the Bulletin 

magazine cannot produce such 

evidence, it appears the animal is 

indeed extinct. 

Ironically, the people whose 

ancestors harried the thylacine out of 

existence have adopted it as a mascot. 

A pair of thylacines flanks the 

Tasmanian coat of arms and anyone 

who wishes to show their pride in 

their Tasmanian heritage, from the 

environmentalist lobby to big 

business, places one on their banner. 

It is a pity the animal could not have 

gained such status while it was alive, 

though perhaps it could only adopt 

such a cuddly image by being safely 

dead. 

In 1999 a team based in the 

Australian Museum led by Michael 

Archer sought to reverse this 

situation. They hoped to isolate DNA 

from a thylacine joey preserved in 

spirits in 1866, with the ultimate aim 

of cloning the animal and 

regenerating the species. Although the 

team was able to succeed in its first 

goal, and even got as far as 

determining the sequence of three 

thylacine genes, in 2005 it was 

realised that genetic technology is 

simply not advanced enough to 

achieve Archer’s very ambitious 

objective. 

What is known about the thylacine 

has been reconstructed from 

examination of dead specimens and 

from a motley assembly of the 

recollections of people who claimed to 

know it, most of whom are now dead. 

Though this approach is useful, it 

leaves many questions unresolved. 

When the biology and ecology of the 

animal itself are disputed, the forces 

that pushed it to extinction must be 

similarly unclear. How important was 

hunting? How important was landclearing? 

How important were dogs; 

and if so, was it directly, by hunting, 

or indirectly through competition for 

food sources? What role, if any, did 

disease play? 

Any change in the relative 

importance of these factors ultimately 

alters the answer posed by modern 

scientists and naturalists: could the 

thylacine have been saved? Since 

their predecessors could not even 

determine whether the marsupial 

should have been saved, the question 

will remain unanswered. 

The Author 

Dr Mark Kellett is a biologist and a 

freelance science writer. 

Further Reading 

Thylacine by David Owen, Allen & 

Unwin, 2003. 

The Last Tasmanian Tiger by Robert Paddle, 

Cambridge University Press, 2000. 

Australian Marsupial Carnivores: Recent 

Advances in Palaeontology by Stephen 

Wroe, in Predators with Pouches: the 

Biology of Carnivorous Marsupials, edited 

by Menna Jones, Chris Dickman & 

Mike Archer, CSIRO Publishing, 2003. 

Mammals of Australia by John Gould, 

annotated by Joan M Dixon, 

Macmillan, 1983. 

Furred Animals of Australia by Ellis 

Troughton, Angus and Robinson, 1946. 

The Doomsday Book of Animals by David 

Day, Ebury Press, 1981. 

Extinct by Anton Gill and Alex West, 

Channel 4 Books, 2001 (the television 

documentary series is also very useful). 

The Thylacine Museum website: 

www.naturalworlds.org/thylacine ◆

Tyger, tyger, burnt out - Australian Heritage Magazine

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