“This will add significant depth to our understanding of the biology of extinct animals and help us to build much better extinct genomes,” he added.Īncient DNA, under the right conditions, can last for more than a million years and has revolutionized scientists’ understanding of the past. Lost remains of last Tasmanian tiger found hiding in plain sight Skull of the last thylacine that died in the Hobart Zoo on 7 September 1936. “We had previously thought only DNA remained in old museum and ancient samples, but this paper shows you can also get RNA from tissues,” said Pask, a professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia and head of the Thylacine Integrated Genetic Restoration Research Lab. Mármol Sánchez said that while de-extinction wasn’t the goal of his team’s research, a better understanding of the Tasmanian tiger’s genetic makeup could help recently launched efforts to bring back the animal in some form.Īndrew Pask, who leads a project aiming to resurrect the thylacine, said the paper was “groundbreaking.” The last thylacine living in captivity, named Benjamin, died from exposure in 1936 at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Tasmania. It disappeared about 2,000 years ago virtually everywhere except the Australian island state of Tasmania, where the population was hunted to the point of extinction by European settlers. “RNA gives you the chance to go through the cell, the tissues and find the real biology that has been preserved in time for that animal, the thylacine species, right before they died,” said lead study author Emilio Mármol Sánchez, a computational biologist at the Centre for Palaeogenetics and SciLifeLab in Sweden.Ībout the size of a coyote, the thylacine was a marsupial predator. The researchers shared their findings in a study published Tuesday in the scientific journal Genome Research. The genetic material - which came from a 130-year-old Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, specimen in the collection of the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm - has allowed scientists to better understand how the animal’s genes functioned. Geneticists have for the first time isolated and decoded RNA molecules from a creature that died out long ago.
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