The team hasn’t set a time line for the project, but Lamm said he thought progress would be quicker than the efforts to bring back the woolly mammoth, noting that elephants take far longer to gestate than dunnarts. ![]() “Any release such as this requires studying the animal and its interaction in the ecosystem over many seasons and in large areas of enclosed land before you would consider a complete rewilding,” he said. Reintroducing the thylacine to its former habit would have to be done very cautiously, Pask added. This means that even a mouse-size marsupial could serve as a surrogate mother for a much larger adult animal like the thylacine, at least in the early stages. The fat-tailed dunnart is much smaller than an adult Tasmanian tiger, but Pask said that all marsupials give birth to tiny young, sometimes as small as a grain of rice. So our ultimate hope is that you would be seeing them in the Tasmanian bushland again one day,” he said. “Our ultimate goal with this technology is to restore these species to the wild, where they played absolutely essential roles in the ecosystem. 'Precious' footage from 1935 of last-known Tasmanian tiger released Once the team has successfully programmed a cell, Pask said stem cell and reproductive techniques involving dunnarts as surrogates would “turn that cell back into a living animal.” ![]() We are essentially engineering our dunnart cell to become a Tasmanian tiger cell,” Pask explained. “We then take living cells from our dunnart and edit their DNA every place where it differs from the thylacine. The project involves several complicated steps that incorporate cutting-edge science and technology, such as gene editing and building artificial wombs.įirst, the team will construct a detailed genome of the extinct animal and compare it with that of its closest living relative – a mouse-size carnivorous marsupial called the fat-tailed dunnart – to identify the differences. This monumental loss occurred shortly after thylacines had been granted protected status, but it was too late to save the species. The last thylacine living in captivity, named Benjamin, died from exposure in 1936 at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Tasmania. As the only marsupial apex predator that lived in modern times, it played a key role in its ecosystem, but that also made it unpopular with humans.Įuropean settlers on the island in the 1800s blamed thylacines for livestock losses (although, in most cases, feral dogs and human habitat mismanagement were actually the culprits), and they hunted the shy, seminocturnal Tasmanian tigers to the point of extinction. Then they went extinctĪbout the size of a coyote, the thylacine disappeared about 2,000 years ago virtually everywhere except the Australian island of Tasmania. Tasmanian tigers were small but not fierce predators. Courtesy National Film and Sound Archive of Australia Taken from the travelogue Tasmania The Wonderland, the images (shot in 1935) are thought to be the last ever filmed of a thylacine named 'Benjamin,' months before his death in 1936. The project is a collaboration with Colossal Biosciences, founded by tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church, who are working on an equally ambitious, if not bolder, $15 million project to bring back the woolly mammoth in an altered form.Ī 21-second newsreel clip featuring the last known images of the extinct thylacine (or Tasmanian Tiger) filmed in 1935, has been digitised in 4K and released by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA). ![]() “This technology offers a chance to correct this and could be applied in exceptional circumstances where cornerstone species have been lost,” he added. “We would strongly advocate that first and foremost we need to protect our biodiversity from further extinctions, but unfortunately we are not seeing a slowing down in species loss,” said Andrew Pask, a professor at the University of Melbourne and head of its Thylacine Integrated Genetic Restoration Research Lab, who is leading the initiative. The ambitious project will harness advances in genetics, ancient DNA retrieval and artificial reproduction to bring back the animal. Scientists want to resurrect the striped carnivorous marsupial, officially known as a thylacine, which used to roam the Australian bush. Almost 100 years after its extinction, the Tasmanian tiger may live once again.
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