Will the Tasmanian Tiger be brought back from extinction before 2035?

The Thylacine, or ‘Tasmanian Tiger’, was a carnivorous marsupial and apex predator. While the thylacine was once native to Australia and New Guinea, it had become locally extinct on both New Guinea and the Australian mainland before British invasion, and remained only on the island of Tasmania. As a result of human bounty hunting and other forces, the last documented killing of a wild thylacine occurred in 1930, and the last captive example of the species died in Hobart Zoo in 1936. Searches and unconfirmed sightings have continued, but the species is now generally believed to be extinct.

A recently-announced partnership between the University of Melbourne and the US Biotech firm Colossal aims to change this, using gene-editing, “marsupial-specific assisted reproductive technologies”, and a previously-sequenced genome taken from juvenile specimen held in a museum to ‘de-extinct’ the thylacine (Guardian, FT).

While some scientists have voiced scepticism, the leaders of the project are confident:

Pask [a professor and evolutionary biologist at the University of Melbourne, who runs the Thylacine Integrated Genetic Restoration Research — or TIGRR — Lab] said the gene-editing techniques and resources that Colossal could bring to the thylacine project would accelerate the rebuilding of the animal, which was first mooted as a possibility in the 1990s.

“It is not a matter of if but when it can happen,” he said, predicting that live animals could be created within the decade.

Ben Lamm, co-founder of Colossal, said a thylacine should be easier to recreate than a mammoth because of the higher quality of the genetic samples available and the ease with which an embryo — initially the size of a grain of rice — could be gestated in the lab using surrogate animals and artificial pouches.

“It is highly possible the thylacine could be birthed before the mammoth,” he said. (FT)