Images of the thylacine are a dime a dozen in Tasmania. Its likeness graces everything from beer bottles to greetings cards. But this watercolour and pencil sketch, now owned by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart, is almost as race as alleged sightings of the thylacine itself.
It was painted in 1833 by English humorist and natural history artist Edward Lear. Unlike traditional colonial works, modelled on bdaly stuffed animals, Lear鈥檚 thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, was seemingly painted from life. But how? Lear never visited Australia. Robert Paddle of the Australian Catholic Unviersity in Melbourne may have the answer. Piecing together data from original sources, he reckons that between 1849 and 1930, 121 live thylacines left Tasmania. But there was one earlier shipment. The Hobart Town Courier of 17 September 1831 reports that a thylacine was shipped to England. Bingo!
THE shaky film lasts only 62 seconds, perhaps because cameraman David Fleay was nipped on the backside by his distressed subject. Still, the grainy 1933 footage is compelling. It shows the last wild thylacine captured in Tasmania pacing her enclosure at the Hobart Zoo.
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Three years later, on a frigid winter night, the last known thylacine died at the zoo. That last Tasmanian tiger-so the story goes-was an adult male called Benjamin, an animal whose name is now legendary in Australia. But was it? Some scientists now claim that the last Tasmanian tiger was not a male at all, but a mature young female-possibly the same forlorn animal seen in the tiny fragment of film from 1933. And indeed a quick look at photographs of 鈥淏enjamin鈥� seem to back this up. They show an animal without any of the male genitalia prominent in snapshots of other male thylacines.
How could history get it so wrong? All too easily, it seems. The legend of Benjamin was created for an uncritical press in 1968 by Frank Darby, a man who claimed to have been Benjamin鈥檚 keeper at Hobart Zoo. His reminiscences struck a chord with the Australian public who lapped up the tale of Benjamin tiger. As far the thylacine goes, getting things wrong-sometimes deliberately-goes all the way back to the beginning of Tasmania鈥檚 human-thylacine relations. Native fauna was of little consequence to the early European colonists, who were bent on recreating England in the Antipodes. Even natural history enthusiasts soon lost interest in the graceful marsupial.
Consequently, Thylacinus cynocephalus-confusingly known as both the Tasmanian tiger and Tasmanian wolf-developed a bad reputation. To graziers it was a solitary, silent and aggressive beast, with a penchant for eating sheep. To scientists it was a second-rate mammal which survived in Tasmania because there were no first-rate placental mammals to compete for its food.
What is the truth? Surprisingly, modern experts can only guess. They have no tigers to study, and much of the documentation from the late 19th and early 20th centuries is based on unnaturally small or captive populations, unrepresentative of those before the Europeans arrived. Even if molecular biologists at the Australian Museum in Sydney succeed in their ambitious quest to clone a thylacine, it will tell us little about the animal鈥檚 lifestyle.
Ironically, scientists know more about the thylacine鈥檚 distant past than its final few centuries. They agree that the delicately striped animal, the size of a large dog, was once widespread on the Australian mainland and Papua New Guinea as well as Tasmania. They have plenty of skeletal remains, fossils, Aboriginal rock paintings and even a mummified thylacine found in 1965 inside a cave on the Nullarbor Plain. The evidence supports claims that 鈥渢igers鈥� roamed the continent until about 4000 years ago when the dingo arrived on the scene.
Genetic evidence is more specific. In 1996, molecular biologists extracted DNA from the skin of a thylacine preserved at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. They analysed complete sequences for two thylacine genes, along with a nearly complete sequence for a third gene. The findings settled a long-running debate about where the thylacine sits on the evolutionary tree. Were they descendants of the Borhyaenids, extinct hyena-like marsupials which lived millions of years ago in South America? Or were they members of the Australian order, Dasyuromorphia? The answer: thylacines formed their own family in the Australian order, separate from insectivorous numbats and meat-eating dasyurids.
Their research also suggests that thylacines first appeared just after the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana broke apart, between 65 and 100 million years ago. And when the last Tasmanian tiger died, it was the end of an entire family of marsupials.
For years Tasmania鈥檚 thylacines thrived, safe on their island refuge. Then in 1830, six years after the arrival of the island鈥檚 first sheep, things changed. A bounty was placed on the tiger, supposedly to protect flocks from hungry thylacines. Between 1888 and 1909, the Tasmanian government paid over two thousand bounties for thylacine scalps.
And that鈥檚 it: the beginning and end of the tiger, not to mention the limits of scientific certainty. Clearly, biologists are keen to flesh out the bare bones of thylacine life. Did they hunt in packs? Were they solitary? Were they shy or aggressive, good hunters or bad? Great questions, but how do you find the answers?
Zoologists Kathryn Medlock and David Pemberton, who work at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, have a new approach to the problem. By taking a fresh look at museum collections of bones, skin and preserved pouch young, newspaper clippings, art work, souvenirs and photographs, they hope clues to behaviour might emerge.
They looked carefully at Edward Lear鈥檚 lifelike sketch of a thylacine. The animal is poised with its right foreleg raised, in an alert tripod position. The smaller Tasmanian devil, Sarcophilus harrisii, is known to adopt this pose when hunting. Perhaps the tiger did too. As they sorted through specimens of pouch young, Medlock and Pemberton recalled reports that thylacines carried four young in their pouch. But the museum鈥檚 specimens were so big the mother could not have moved easily if she carried a quartet. Maybe, like the Tasmanian devils, families cooperated in hunting.
And what about teeth and skeletal remains? They reveal a slight animal, not the fierce and nasty creature of sheep farmers鈥� legend. Their size may also explain why, despite their tough image, thylacines 鈥渄idn鈥檛 bite and carry on鈥� when they were snared.
It is early days yet, and there is plenty more material to study. Still, a kinder, gentler image of the Tasmanian tiger is emerging. Soon scientists and the public may view that evocative 62 seconds as the last days of 鈥淏enjamina鈥�, an intelligent and social animal that fell foul of the ultimate predator, Homo sapiens.