A century-old find might play a huge role in bringing the extinct Tasmanian Tiger back to life.
Researchers at a Melbourne museum couldn't believe their luck when, during their attempts to bring back the thylacine, better known as the Tasmanian Tiger, they found the answer in the back of a cupboard.
They do say that the best things are sometimes hidden for 110 years in storage in an Australian museum. Or something like that.
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What is the Tasmanian Tiger?
You may have heard of the Tasmanian Tiger before, though it was last seen in captivity in 1936 and declared extinct in 1986 after no sightings for 50 years.
Having a dog-like appearance while sporting some tiger-like stripes on its lower back, the animal was Australia's only marsupial apex predator that once lived across the continent, becoming restricted to Tasmania around 3,000 years ago.
Who is behind the project to bring them back to life?
The scientific project to bring back the thylacine is being led by American biotechnology 'de-extinction and species preservation' company Colossal, which is also aiming to use genetic engineering techniques to bring back the extinct species of the woolly mammoth and the dodo.
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Owned by tech and software entrepreneur Ben Lamm, the company has raised $235 million (£180.7 million) and is funding research at 13 labs across the world.
The significance of the discovery
In Colossal's aim to bring the animal back to the wild, some researchers at a Melbourne museum uncovered a shockingly well-preserved head of the extinct Tasmanian Tiger in a bucket.
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Professor Andrew Pask, the head of the thylacine integrated genetic restoration research at the University of Melbourne, said: “It was literally a head in a bucket of ethanol in the back of a cupboard that had just been dumped there with all the skin removed, and been sitting there for about 110 years.”
“It was pretty putrid, a completely gruesome sight. People had chopped large chunks off it,” he explained.
The significant thing about the discovery was that it contained material that scientists thought were gone forever, such as RNA molecules that would be crucial in reconstructing the marsupial's genome.
Pask claimed: “This was the miracle that happened with this specimen.
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“It blew my mind.”
The science behind bringing the thylacine back
One year later, the professor admitted that it has advanced the work of scientists in Australia and the US, revealing: “We are further along than I thought we would be, and we have completed a lot of things that we thought would be very challenging and others said would be impossible.”
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It is said that the soft tissue contained preserved long sequences of DNA, the genetic make-up of any living being, as well as RNA - which is much less stable than the former, varying in different types of tissue.
But it too, had active genes needed for a specific tissue to function.
So from this discovery, information related to the animal's eyes, nose, tongue and other facial material were obtained and a picture of what the thylacine could taste, smell and see was painted.
Pask claimed that it is the first annotated extinct animal genome: “It helps us prove that what we are bringing back is genuinely a thylacine and not some hybrid animal.”
Topics: Science, Australia, Animals, Technology
Joshua Nair