The Tasmanian wolf ( Thylacinus cynocephalus ) is believed to have been extinct since 1936. The Tasmanian wolf commonly known as Tasmanian Tiger and Thylacine. Despite its appearance and its popular name, this animal was not in fact a species of wolf, nor it was a dog, which it also resembled.
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| Thylacine Specimen |
The Thylacine had become extinct on the Australian mainland before British settlement of the continent, but it survived on the island of Tasmania. The only recorded species of Thylacinus, a genus that resembles the dogs and foxes of the family Canidae, the animal was a predatory marsupial that existed on mainland Australia during the Holocene epoch and observed by Europeans on the island of Tasmania; the species is known as the Tasmanian tiger for the striped markings of the pelage.
Although the Thylacine was extinct on mainland Australia, it survived into the 1930's on the island state of Tasmania. hey were rarely sighted during this time but slowly began to be credited with numerous attacks on sheep. the Tasmanian government paid £1 per head for dead adult Thylacines and ten shillings for pups. In all, they paid out 2,184 bounties.
It was actually a marsupial - the largest carnivorous in recent times - and was closely related to the kangaroo, and the wombat. Man is solely responsible for the extinction of the Tasmanian wolf. In the 19th century, when Tasmania encouraged agriculture, the Tasmanian wolf was considered a threat to livestock. So, hunters were paid to hunt and kill the animal, and it was soon hunted to extinction in Tasmania just for money.
The last captive Thylacine, named as "Benjamin", was trapped in the Florentine Valley by Elias Churchill in 1933, and sent to the Hobart Zoo where it lived for three years.
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| Benjamin |
Benjamin died on 7 September 1936. It is believed to have died as the result of neglect—locked out of its sheltered sleeping quarters, it was exposed to a rare occurrence of extreme Tasmanian weather: extreme heat during the day and freezing temperatures at night.