Thylacine
Thylacine
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14 Sep 1999 AUSTRALIA:
Support for Tassie tiger clone project.
By Anne Barbeliuk.
An international organisation known as "the world's university" has thrown its support behind a bid to clone the Tasmanian tiger. The California-based cyberuni.org, inc, yesterday said it wanted to work on the project. "We would welcome any opportunity to be involved in the Tasmanian tiger project," said co-founder Dr Rhys Cullen. He said such research had numerous positive spin-offs, such as genes from extinct species being incorporated into existing animals for commercial purposes. Dr Cullen said such a plan was already under way in New Zealand. "Scientists from Otago University are reputed to have isolated the growth hormone gene of the moa, which stood up to 3m tall," he said. "If this gene were incorporated into ostriches, there is the potential that a superior meat-producing bird could result." Dr Cullen was commenting on a plan announced last week to clone the Tasmanian tiger. The Australian Museum is embarking on the project with a $20,000 grant from the NSW Government and a trust underpinned by a private donation.
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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.
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Tuesday, 14 February 2006
Reporter: Jane Munro
It was 3.30am on a mild January morning when North Coast resident Mick Stubbs watched a cat-like creature walk along a roadway near Mullumbimby and then duck under a fence before disappearing into the long grass.
"In the first split second I said 'oh look, there's a fox' and then straight away I realised it was no fox because it had a huge long tail that was thin and even in length. I looked up the body and it was a long body, it looked very cat like, but obviously much larger than a cat, probably 700 millimetres high. The tail was a very long tail, it had a gold-coloured coat, and rounded ears, bright gold eyes in the headlights. It was definitely no canine animal. It was no dingo cross or no wild dog. I suppose I had a three or four seconds look at it. It was something like I have never seen before and it really took me back," Mr Stubbs said.
"It sounds a little bit sensational but I have been racking my brain and talking to people and looking up books, I have got it down to three animals, two of them are marsupial predators, carnivores, and the other is a domesticated cat, but in the gigantic form as big as any other large predatory cat."
Since sighting the animal, Mr Stubbs says he has heard of more than ten other people who have reported a similar sighting on the North Coast.
"The Great Dividing Range has never been totally destroyed and somehow they have managed to extend their range back down to the coast, if they haven't always been here. Being nocturnal and probably very smart and able to range large distances, I don't put it beyond being a Thylacine."
"I have always been interested in the natural world, so that's why when I saw this creature, it was almost unbelievable, and that's is why it has taken me this long to get my own head around what I actually saw."
"It turns out that I am not the only one to see strange looking larger predatory animals. I am a firm believer now, that as wild as it sounds, we have got a so-called extinct species in our midst," Mr Stubbs said.
The last known Thylacine or Tasmanian Tiger died at the Hobart Zoo in 1936.
http://www.abc.net.au/northcoast/stories/s1569808.htm?backyard
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Sunday, 10 September 2006
An old trapper's hut where the last tasmanian tiger caught in the wild was captured has been rediscovered.
The hut is open to the public at a threatened species field day in the upper Florentine Forest near Maydena in remote southern Tasmania.
The trapper's hut was built in the early 1920s by Elias Churchill.
Mr Churchill caught the last wild tasmanian tiger in 1933 and took it Beaumeuris Zoo in Hobart.
The hut was rediscovered a month ago and now tiger historian Col Bailey wants to restore it.
He has applied for National Trust funding and is pushing for a 50-metre logging exclusion zone around the area to be increased.
Hundreds of people are visiting the hut today and wildlife experts are giving talks on the tiger, wedgetail eagle and tasmanian devil.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/items/200609/1737405.htm?tasmania
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06 May 2000 Australia
Tassie holds key to tiger rebirth
By Anne Barbeliuk
Interstate scientists engrossed in reincarnating the thylacine were reminded yesterday: don't leave Tasmania off your genetic map. The world's richest diversity of preserved thylacine pups is locked in vaults beneath the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Museum vertebrate zoology curator David Pemberton yesterday said Tasmania's five pups were vital in any attempt to create a thylacine population. "While the animal might be extinct, we are still the moral keeper of the Tasmanian Tiger," Dr Pemberton said. "From that point of view Tasmania has a strong responsibility to look after the genetic material." His comments follow Thursday's announcement that high-quality DNA had been extracted from the 134-year-old preserved remains of a thylacine pup from the Australian Museum in Sydney.
Museum director Professor Michael Archer labelled the breakthrough the biological equivalent of man's first step on the moon. Eventually scientists hope to see a complete population of Tasmanian Tigers returned to the wild. Dr Pemberton said this final aim would inevitably require Tasmania's help. He said the TMAG had not yet decided whether the state's preserved pups should be used in the Sydney project. However, the museum resolved to give first preference to the Australian Museum if other laboratories were vying for the genetic material. "We will consider them first but we won't necessarily hand anything over," Dr Pemberton said. Sydney thylacine cloning project coordinator Dr Don Colgan yesterday agreed the quality of Tasmania's thylacines was unrivalled. He said lines of communication had already been opened with the TMAG. "We are naturally going to be looking for Tasmania's cooperation," Dr Colgan said. "We have already indicated [to the TMAG] that we would be more than interested in taking tissue samples." Any decision on whether to release genetic tissue would be considered by the TMAG board of trustees.
Trustee member Professor Jim Reid said yesterday the board would be happy to cooperate with the cloning project "provided we can see justification in the science of any proposal that comes before us". Professor Reid said he supported the project's endeavour to map the genome of the animal, but ethical questions needed to be raised about cloning and repopulating the thylacine. He was not sure the cloning project - expected to cost at least $80 million - was worthwhile. "There are probably other things I would sooner see the science research dollar spent on," he said. He would rather money be spent on conserving endangered species than resurrecting extinct ones. The Australian Museum has only one pup from which to make clones while Tasmania has five - one female and four males. "We have the diversity here and they'll need that diversity," Dr Pemberton said. "We might be small and we might be down here but we have the material and this is still our tiger."