Originally published at: This colorized footage of the last Tasmanian tiger (thylacine) is incredible | Boing Boing
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…ly sad and depressing.
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That was so friggen cool. Sadly their extinction could have been avoided.
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It’s fascinating how convergent evolution has independently come up with that basic body plan again and again for large predators. The canids evolved the wolf, the feliforms evolved hyenas, and even waaaay over on another branch of the mammalian family tree the marsupials evolved this critter.
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Very cool, very sad, and very stressful to watch that poor critter exhibit just about every stress signal in the book.
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Poor thing looked miserable in that enclosure.
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See also “carcinisation” – the independent evolution of the crab shape from various groups of crustaceans – many of the organisms we call “crabs” colloquially aren’t particularly closely related,
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If somewhere there isn’t a database of the state of preservation of potential DNA samples of ‘recently’ extinct animals, there should be. (“Passenger Pigeon”, Ectopistes migratorius, “stuffed specimen in the British Museum nearby the mens loo third floor” …) -sigh-
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Cloning a thylacine is still going to be a heck of a challenge until someone figures out how to grow an artificial uterus.
You could theoretically clone an extinct bird in a similarly-sized bird’s egg, or clone an extinct mammoth in the uterus of an Indian elephant, but where are you going to put a Thylacine embryo? Their closest living relative is the Tasmanian Devil and they are neither an especially close relative nor an appropriate size.
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There’s a colleague of a colleague (in a department of Biological Structure, oddly enough) who is essentially working on an artificial uterus. An occasional topic which comes up over coffee is “What will the anti-abortion rabble do when there is no more absolute in vivo pregnancy ‘weeks’? When every lab combination of egg and sperm could be a realized human, what effect will that have on their sick misogynistic calculations?” … probably relatively little -sigh-
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There’s some serious jaw mobility on that critter.
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Filming “the last of” will become a new industry if science is right about the extinctions that are already in the pipeline, particularly in Australia, which even now has an abysmal record of species extinction.
It’s way beyond sad.
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If there isn’t one now, there should be a DNA database of current endangered species: We’re already into an extinction event of our own making… the Holocene Era.
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The sun above me and a concrete floor below
Scratch at the chain links, maybe bare my teeth for show
Fed twice a day, I don’t go hungry anymore
Feel in my bones just what the future has in store
I pace in circles
So the camera will see
Look hard at my stripes
There’ll be no more after me
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