Scientists are now seeking to resurrect the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, which has been extinct since 1936 using emerging advanced genetics technology.
The creature was wrongly blamed by European colonizers in the 1800s and early 1900s for killing their sheep and chickens. The dog-sized, tiger-striped, carnivorous marsupial was slaughtered by settlers by the thousands, exchanging the animals' skins for a government bounty.
Resurrecting Extinct Animals
The last known thylacine spent its remaining days pacing a zoo cage in Hobart, Tasmania, and later died of neglect in 1936. Now, the wolflike creature is poised to become a symbol of de-extinction as an initiative seeks to create a new life for lost species.
A Texas-based de-extinction company, Colossal Biosciences, is the one that made headlines last September when it revealed that it planned to bring back the wooly mammoth. The company announced recently that its second project would be to resurrect thylacine.
Since 1999, Australian scientists have been hoping to use advanced genetics technology to try to bring the Tasmanian tiger back to life. When the species went extinct, Tasmania lost its top predator, as per Scientific American.
In theory, reintroducing proxy thylacines could help restore balance to the region's remaining forests by picking off sick or weak animals and controlling overabundant herbivores such as wallabies and kangaroos, said researchers.
However, early attempts to resurrect the animal by cloning it from museum specimens' DNA have failed, and the effort has not attracted significant funding, until this year. Colossal Biosciences, co-founded by Harvard University geneticist George Church and tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm, is now working with the University of Melbourne's Andrew Pask.
According to BBC, the team said they will be using stem cells and gene-editing technology to revive the Tasmanian tiger, expecting that the first de-extinct thylacine will come in 10 years' time. However, other experts are skeptical of the efforts and believe that de-extinction is purely science fiction.
The Tasmanian Tiger
The team of researchers will take stem cells from a living marsupial species with similar DNA to the thylacine and use gene-editing technology to "bring back" the species, or at least, an extremely close approximation of it.
The idea would represent a remarkable achievement for the researchers attempting it and would require a number of scientific breakthroughs. If the team is successful, it would mark the first de-extinction event in the history of mankind.
Associate Professor Jeremy Austin from the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA said that the idea is fairytale science. He added that the project is more about "media attention for the scientists and less about doing serious science."
In a statement, Pask said, "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. This technology offers a chance to correct this and could be applied in exceptional circumstances where cornerstone species have been lost."
He added that the ultimate goal of the team was to use the technology to restore species to the wild where the animals played absolutely essential roles in the ecosystem. Pask hoped that one day, the Tasmanian tiger population would one day roam the Tasmanian bushland again, CNN reported.
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