The remains of the last Tasmanian Tigerthe only predatory marsupial of Australia that went extinct in 1936, were found in a museum closet, 85 years after they were declared missing, institutional sources from the oceanic country reported this Monday.
The last copy of the thylacine o Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus) that is known to have died in captivity on September 7, 1936 in the zoo in the Australian city of Hobart and, later, its remains were delivered to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG).
This specimen, an elderly female, was captured by a hunter in the Florentine Valley on the island of Tasmania, in South Australia, and sold to the Hobart Zoo, the capital of this region, in May 1936.
“During years, many curators and museum researchers searched for his remains without successas no thylacine material dating to 1936 had been recorded in the zoological collection, so it was assumed that his body had been discarded,” said researcher Robert Paddle in a TMAG statement.
Paddle and Kathryn Medlock, who will publish their find this week in the Australian Zoologist journal, discovered that the Tasmanian tiger remains did arrive at TMAG in 1936 – although their arrival was not properly recorded by the museum’s taxidermists – thanks to a key document that allowed tracking the remains of the animal.
The researchers also discovered that the remains of this extinct specimen (the flayed skin and the skeleton) were used to traveling exhibits and so they were kept in a cabinet in the educational section of the museum.
”The skin was carefully tanned as a flat hide by the museum’s taxidermist, William Cunningham, thus allowing it to be easily transported and used as a demonstration specimen for school classes on Tasmanian marsupials,” said Medlock, a curator in TMAG’s department of vertebrate zoology.
The thylacine, a marsupial with stripes across its back that resembled those of a tiger, came to inhabit mainland Australia and the island of New Guinea, although It disappeared from those places about 3,000 years ago due to climate change.
The island of Tasmania was the only place where the species survived, but its extinction accelerated with the arrival of Europeans in Oceania in the 18th century, who launched an intense hunting campaign between 1830 and 1909, encouraged by bounties to end with this predator that ate cattle.
Although Tasmanian tigers went extinct 85 years ago when the last one died at Hobart Zoo, the species was only officially declared extinct in the 1980s.
(with information from EFE)
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Source-www.infobae.com