26 May 1999 AUSTRALIA:
TAS - Expert pronounces tassie tiger extinct.
By Don Woolford HOBART, AAP
While the hopeful searches and sightings continue, the Tasmanian tiger has been pronounced extinct by the leading authority on the mysterious animal. "If it isn't extinct, it's as near as damn it," Eric Guiler, the retiredUniversity of Tasmania zoology professor who's spent a lifetime on the trail of the largest carnivorous marsupial, said today. Professor Guiler said there were still occasional, although declining, sightings reported. "But we have investigated each one and found no corroborative evidence," he said. "It's always been a waste of time." Professor Guiler has just completed his third, and last, book on the tiger - or thylacine. In "Tasmanian Tiger: a lesson to be learnt", he and co-author Philippe Godard also dismiss the feasibility of Jurassic Park-style cloning of the tiger from the DNA of remains in museums. There was a recent flurry of speculation that Tasmanian tigers could be cloned from a baby preserved in alcohol. Professor Guiler said cloning was theoretically possible, but because of the way the DNA fragmented, it was not practical science.
What was possible was to breed the tiger's distinctive stripes into a large dog. "But why bother with an expensive and complex exercise to produce a dog disguised as a thylacine?" he asked. Professor Guiler's pronouncement is unlikely to kill off hopeful speculation about an animal that has captured the imagination of generations. There are tiger trails, tiger exhibitions, a tiger website and devotees who still believe it lurks in the forests. A young Sydney GP called Bob Brown came to Tasmania in the 1970s to find it. He didn't. But he stayed to become Australia's most famous green and a senator. A decade later an American television mogul offered a $100,000 reward for a verified sighting. He kept his money. "People love it because they love animal mysteries," Professor Guiler said. "Except that it did exist, the tiger became like the Loch Ness Monster or the Abominable Snowman." In fact, the thylacine is nothing to do with a tiger and is more closely related to kangaroos and koalas. The last killed in the wild was in 1930, while the last in captivity died in 1936 when, most belatedly, it was listed as an endangered species. "Sightings" have continued. Professor Guiler himself found in the 1960s what he believes was a fresh paw mark. But nothing has been confirmed. Part of the appeal may be a collective guilty conscience that can only be salved by the tiger's reappearance, because the general view is that it has been wiped out by a combination of bounties paid early in the century when it was regarded as a sheep-killling menace and change of habitat. Professor Guiler thinks this may be exaggerated. He said it had never been abundant, the Aborigines also hunted it and it may well have been on the way out anyway. Certainly the white settlers accelerated the process, he said. However there was evidence that disease hit the tigers hard around 1908. And habitat change may actually have helped it, as the opening of the forests led to a big increase in kangaroos and wallabies, its main food.