The image is haunting. You’ve likely seen the grainy, black-and-white footage of a striped, dog-like creature pacing a cramped enclosure. That’s Benjamin. He was the last known thylacine, and when he died at the Hobart Zoo in 1936, an entire lineage vanished. It’s a gut-punch of a story because it feels so preventable. People often ask why did Tasmanian tigers go extinct, expecting a simple answer like "climate change" or "they just couldn't compete."
The truth is way more aggressive. It wasn’t a slow fade. It was a systematic, state-sponsored execution combined with a string of tragic biological bad luck.
We killed them. Then, nature finished the job.
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The Bounty: How Fear Fueled a Massacre
Back in the 1800s, European settlers arrived in Tasmania with thousands of sheep. They saw this strange, nocturnal predator with a gape that could open 80 degrees and panicked. They called it a "hyena" or a "tiger," though it was actually a marsupial related to kangaroos.
The conflict was immediate.
Farmers blamed thylacines for every missing lamb, even though feral dogs were often the real culprits. By 1830, the Van Diemen’s Land Company offered rewards for dead "tigers." By 1888, the Tasmanian government actually got involved, putting a price of £1 on every adult head. That was a lot of money back then—basically a week's wages for doing nothing more than shooting a shy animal that mostly wanted to be left alone.
Over 2,000 bounties were paid out. Thousands more were likely killed and never claimed.
By the time the government realized their mistake and granted the species "protected" status in July 1936, it was a joke. Benjamin died just two months later. Imagine protecting a species sixty days before its total erasure. It’s the definition of "too little, too late."
The Genetic Bottleneck Nobody Talks About
While the guns did the heavy lifting, the species was already on shaky ground. Recent genomic research led by experts like Andrew Pask at the University of Melbourne has revealed something fascinating. Long before humans showed up with rifles, the thylacine’s genetic diversity was tanking.
Around 70,000 to 120,000 years ago, the population took a massive hit.
This left them with a very shallow gene pool. Why does that matter? Well, when a population lacks genetic variety, they become sitting ducks for disease. If one animal gets sick, they all get sick because their immune systems are basically identical.
Many historians and biologists, including Robert Paddle in his book The Last Tasmanian Tiger, suggest that a distemper-like respiratory disease ripped through the remaining wild population in the early 1900s. It was the final nail. The thylacines were already scattered and being hunted; then, a "marsupial flu" likely wiped out the pockets of survivors that the hunters couldn't find.
Competition and the Mainland Mystery
It’s easy to forget that thylacines weren't always just in Tasmania. They used to be all over mainland Australia and even New Guinea. They disappeared from the mainland about 3,000 years ago.
Why?
The arrival of the dingo is the usual suspect. Dingoes were faster, lived in packs, and hunted the same prey. But it’s not just about "who wins in a fight." Dingoes were better at surviving the changing climate as Australia became more arid. The thylacine was a specialized ambush predator. When the thick forests thinned out into open scrubland, the thylacine's hunting style stopped working.
Tasmania became their last fortress simply because dingoes never made it across the Bass Strait.
The "Sheep Killer" Myth vs. Reality
One of the most tragic aspects of why did Tasmanian tigers go extinct is that the primary reason for their persecution was largely a lie.
Biomechanical studies of the thylacine's jaw show they actually had relatively weak bites. They weren't powerful enough to take down large livestock regularly. They preferred smaller prey like wallabies or possums. A study published in the Journal of Zoology used 3D modeling to show that their skulls would have buckled under the stress of struggling with a large sheep.
We killed them for a crime they weren't even physically capable of committing on a large scale.
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Is the Thylacine Actually Gone?
You’ll hear stories. Someone in the Tasmanian wilderness sees a striped tail disappear into the ferns. The "Munns Report" or various blurry dashcam videos keep the hope alive. Honestly, it’s unlikely. Scientists have combed those forests. They’ve set up thousands of camera traps.
Nothing.
If a large predator were still out there, we’d find scat, or fur, or DNA in the water systems. Environmental DNA (eDNA) testing is incredibly sensitive now. We can literally scoop a cup of water from a river and tell you every animal that drank from it in the last 48 hours. So far, no thylacine DNA has turned up in the wild.
The focus has now shifted to "de-extinction." Companies like Colossal Biosciences are working with the University of Melbourne to try and "edit" the DNA of a fat-tailed dunnart (a tiny relative) to bring the thylacine back.
It sounds like sci-fi. It might actually happen. But even if we grow a thylacine in a lab, we can't bring back the culture of the species—the learned behaviors passed from parent to offspring in the wild. That's gone forever.
How to Help Prevent the Next Thylacine
The story of the thylacine is a warning. It shows how quickly a "common" animal can vanish when politics, fear, and biology collide. If you want to make sure we don't repeat this with currently endangered species like the Tasmanian Devil or the Orange-bellied Parrot, here is how to take action:
- Support eDNA Research: Organizations using environmental DNA technology are the best bet for finding "lost" species and monitoring those on the brink.
- Advocate for Habitat Corridors: Fragmentation is what killed the thylacine’s genetic diversity. Species need to be able to move and breed with different groups to keep their DNA strong.
- Challenge "Pest" Narratives: When you hear about culling predators because they are a "nuisance" to industry, look for the science. Often, the predator is a vital part of the ecosystem that keeps everything else in balance.
- Contribute to the Thylacine Archive: If you're a history buff, digital archives are always looking for help transcribing old records and bounty logs to better map out exactly where and when the population collapsed.
The thylacine didn't just "go" extinct. We pushed it. Understanding that distinction is the only way to stop the same thing from happening to the animals still walking the earth today.
Actionable Insight: Visit the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) online to view the high-definition 4K colorized scans of the last known thylacine. Seeing the animal in color removes the "historical" distance and makes the reality of its loss much more immediate. Knowing what we lost is the first step toward valuing what we still have.