They cleared away large portions of thylacine habitat, built farms, and raised sheep. Unfortunately for thylacines, European settlers arrived in Tasmania in the early 1800s. Yet they continued to thrive in Tasmania, where human populations were lower. By around 2,000 years ago, thylacines were already nearly extinct in mainland Australia. When people introduced and began hunting alongside dingoes around 3,500 years ago, thylacines found themselves unable to compete for prey. In fact, the species faced pressure from humans for thousands of years before their extinction. Despite their hunting prowess (and partially because of it) thylacines’ way of life was disrupted as human populations in Australia grew larger. They preyed on small marsupials, rodents, and birds, hunting mainly at night. Thylacines roamed parts of mainland Australia, as well as the islands of Tasmania and New Guinea. Modern marsupials include animals like kangaroos and koalas. In reality, thylacines were marsupials, mammals that raise their young in pouches.
They also weren’t canines, although they closely resembled them thanks to convergent evolution, a phenomenon where two or more species separately develop similar traits due to the niche they fill in their respective ecosystems. This led to many of their common nicknames, including Tasmanian tiger, but thylacines were not felines.
Most of their fur was a tawny brown, but they also had wide, black, horizontal stripes down their backs. Their large heads housed jaws that could open unusually wide–up to 80 degrees. Adults grew to be between 3.25 to 4.25 feet long, with tails that reached over a foot in length. There’s no doubt that thylacines were visually-striking animals. Of all the species that have gone extinct within the span of human history, why is it that thylacines seem to fascinate people so much? Several expeditions, including one on this day in 1931, have ventured into the Australian wilderness in hopes of finding thylacines alive, but none have succeeded, despite what some Youtubers may say. In fact, people have been searching for surviving thylacines ever since their extinction in 1936. These extinct Australian marsupials have captured modern imaginations thanks to a slew of supposed, bigfoot-esque sightings of them in the wild.
They’ve had a lot of colorful monikers, from “Tasmanian tiger” to “zebra wolf”, but thylacines were a species all their own.