- The flayed skin and skeleton were used for traveling exhibits and demonstrations in school classes.

File photo of the Tasmanian tiger. / Wikimedia

Remains of last Tasmanian tiger found in museum closet

The remains of the last Tasmanian tiger, Australia's only predatory marsupial that went extinct in 1936, have been found in a museum cabinet, 85 years after they were declared missing.

The last known specimen of the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus) died in captivity on September 7, 1936, in the zoo in the Australian city of Hobart, and, later, its remains were delivered to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG).

The elderly female was captured by a hunter in the Florentine Valley on the island of Tasmania, in South Australia, and sold to the Hobart Zoo, the capital of this region.

"For years, many curators and museum researchers searched for his remains without success, as no thylacine material dating to 1936 had been recorded in the zoological collection, so it was assumed that his body had been discarded," said the researcher Robert Paddle in a TMAG statement.

Paddle and Kathryn Medlock, who will publish their find in the scientific journal Australian Zoologist, discovered that the remains of the Tasmanian Tiger did arrive at TMAG in 1936 - although their arrival was not properly recorded by the museum's taxidermists - thanks to a key document that allowed to trace the remains of the animal.

Remains of the last copy

The researchers also discovered that the remains of this extinct specimen (the flayed skin and the skeleton) were used for traveling exhibitions and that is why they were kept in a closet in the educational section of the museum.

"The skin was carefully tanned into a flat hide by the museum's taxidermist, William Cunningham, allowing it to be easily transported and used as a demonstration specimen for school classes on Tasmanian marsupials," said Medlock, a curator in the department of vertebrate zoology at the museum TMAG.

The thylacine, a marsupial with stripes across its back reminiscent of a tiger, once lived on mainland Australia and the island of New Guinea, although it disappeared from those places about 3,000 years ago due to climate change.

The island of Tasmania was the only place where the species survived, but its extinction accelerated with the arrival of Europeans in Oceania in the 18th century, who launched an intense hunting campaign between 1830 and 1909, encouraged by bounties to end with this predator that ate cattle.

Although Tasmanian tigers went extinct 85 years ago when the last one died at Hobart Zoo, the species was only officially declared extinct in the 1980s.

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