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Thylacines & Thylacoleos: Pre-1936 & Genetic Ethics

Yes, and here again it is just a theory. But does look as if we're ever going to see a live Tas/wolf it ill have to be by Cloning.
 
Brig said:
Yes, and here again it is just a theory. But does look as if we're ever going to see a live Tas/wolf it ill have to be by Cloning.
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A theory backed up by solid evidence. We have the receipts Brig.
 
Brig said:
Receipts? Explain, please.
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We have records of the payments. One or two got paid a fair bit, but it was over years, it wasn't enough to live on. When you know that it ceases to become just a theory, it's an economic fact. You could not live on thylacine payments and no-one did. There were no full time tiger hunters, that there were was the theory, and it's been disproved.

As for the later years, the maximun price I've heard was £50. That was 1924 and for a family group, it did change the lives of the trapper and his family, but it was still only about half a years wages, and he only ever caught one (plus young). There are only two men from 1922 onward recorded as having caught more than one, an employee at Woolnorth who's name I forget, and Elias Churchill who's credited with 8 and that's ridiculous.
 
Thanks for the information. But I till would like to see a real, live, one some time.
 
Brig said:
Thanks for the information. But I till would like to see a real, live, one some time.
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As would I. But it won't happen for either of us I'm sorry to say. I spoke to the guy who started the cloning project earlier this year, I strongly got the impression that despite they're having the complete genome, the practicalities won't be solved anytime soon.
 
Nurtz. Oh well I can still hope live ones exist somewhere in the wild. Yes it's a long shot. But there is always that possibility.
 
oldrover said:
As would I. But it won't happen for either of us I'm sorry to say. I spoke to the guy who started the cloning project earlier this year, I strongly got the impression that despite they're having the complete genome, the practicalities won't be solved anytime soon.
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Damn, that is top of my bucket list.
 
New article in Nature.

NEWS
11 DECEMBER 2017

Tasmanian tiger genome offers clues to its extinction
Geneticists analyse DNA from preserved pup, more than 80 years after the last of its kind died.

The last known thylacine, a marsupial predator that once ranged from New Guinea to Tasmania, died on 7 September 1936 in a zoo in Hobart, Australia. The species’ complete genome, reported on 11 December in Nature Ecology and Evolution, offers clues to its decline and its uncanny resemblance to members of the distantly related dog family1.

“They were this bizarre and singular species. There was nothing else like them in the world at the time,” says Charles Feigin, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the University of Melbourne, Australia, who was involved in the sequencing effort. “They look just like a dog or wolf, but they’re a marsupial.”

People have been nothing but bad news for the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus), commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger. The species’ range throughout Australasia shrivelled as early hunter-gatherers expanded across the region, and the introduction by humans of the dingo (Canis lupus dingo) to Australia several thousand years ago reduced numbers still further, leaving an isolated thylacine population clinging on only in Tasmania. European colonists in the nineteenth century saw the predators as a threat to their sheep, and paid a bounty of £1 per carcass. Thylacines were on the cusp of extinction in the wild when the rewards were ended in 1909, leading zoos to pay handsomely for the last few individuals. ..

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08368-1?utm_source=TWT_NatureNews&sf176073428=1
 
Definitely agree that they were effectively extinct in 1909, yes there were some later but not very many. The evidence on which the 40 ish or so proposed after this time is frankly utter shite, so far I've been able to find far less well supported specimens.

The funny thing about all of this, as in this paper, was that the big news the sequencing of the genome was actually first announced to Josh Gates, on 'Destination Unknown', a Travel Channel programme?

There seems little doubt that the thylacine was in jeopardy but it's worth noting that the massive crash, 1906-09, coincides nicely with the emergence of the 'skin shed', which allowed for mass processing of wallaby, and possum skins in the field in the highlands.
 
Which still indicates that humans were responsible for the tas wolf's extinction. So it only stands to reason that we should bring back the species if at all possible.
 
lordmongrove said:
Disney film makers seem to think skunks and raccoons are native to the UK. Dumb bastards.
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I saw something Disney looking once, in the Czech Republic, I admit I was twatted, sort of a little lack thing with a white Mochican, it wasn't just me, a few of us saw them. I don't know what they were.
 
oldrover said:
I saw something Disney looking once, in the Czech Republic, I admit I was twatted, sort of a little lack thing with a white Mochican, it wasn't just me, a few of us saw them. I don't know what they were.
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Could it have been a Marbled Polecat?

6733.jpg

Range -
Marbled_Polecat_area.png

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbled_polecat
 
David Plankton said:
Could it have been a Marbled Polecat?

View attachment 8490

Range -
View attachment 8491

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbled_polecat
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No, it wasn't one of those. I wish it had been though.

What I saw was all black in the body, I think it might have had a bushy tail, but I didn't see the head. The other blokes I was with did though, and they described them as being all black with a white Mohican. It was some sort of rodent, that was clear from what I saw, and the number of them that were seen. They're probably really common, but I still haven't ever seen one anywhere else.
 
Unexplainable animals show up about anywhere. Seems some dorks delight in crossing anything that might cross. We have a couple of them in this area. I have seen a really strange "Fox" and a really strange cat (no way a house cat). The fox had a rather long neck, his legs were shorter in front, longer in back and he sort of loped along. Both my wife and I got a really good look at the critter. I have no idea what they crossed to get that. The cat was more the size of a young couger. He was lighter than the tawny couger and had indistinct black spots mostly toward his rear section. He had a tail as long as his body that ended in a bulb. BTW the fox had a typical foxy bushy tail and its color was pretty much typical for a red fox.
 
lordmongrove said:
I can't recall seeing this photo before. Its from The Illustrated London News, Sat. 27 Mar. 1926. View attachment 8513
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It's quite newly surfaced, but it's been doing the rounds for about a year or so. I did look into it, from what I remember it was even at the time publication an old stock photo, I'm not sure what the date is. But it isn't the female that arrived in London in that year.

Looking at it here, I don't think it's even London, because that to me is a nursing female, and none of those are recorded there by Campbell after 1863. It doesn't look like the NMH either, but I could be wrong. It's definitely not the main enclosure at Queen's Domain, but it might be Sandy Bay. My guess would be one of the Australian Mainland Zoos, most probably Melbourne.
 
And this one of a single male came up last year. This is one of only two shots taken from outside the mesh at Queen's Domain
unkown tiger.jpg
.
 
Great photos. Gives us a much better reference point.
 
Seriously, Oh bollocks. Last night I went over figures taken from the ITSD again, they've never rung true. It's my opinion that the fihures we've seen presented in Paddle, Campbell, and Sleightholme, Guiler etc are a huge over estimation.
 
It's a shame but i don't think the whole cloning thing will ever work. I think if the Tasmanian wolf has a future its lurking in the outback not in a test tube.
 
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