Was The Thylacine Doomed Even Before Humans Arrived in Australia?

Benjamin, the last living thylacine (as far as we know), photographed in 1933, three years before his death. (Credit: Photographer unknown, Wikimedia Commons) The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, went extinct in the 1930s after a concerted eradication campaign by humans. But a new study suggests that the marvelous marsupial native to Australia may have been in trouble long before then. Among recently extinct animals, few capture the imagination quite like the thylacine. The Tasmanian tiger appeared almost dog-like (it's also called the Tasmanian wolf) and yet was loaded with bonus features such as a back-facing pouch and a jaw able to open remarkably wide (though not quite as dramatically as some sources claim). The large marsupial apex predator once roamed throughout Australia and New Guinea, but went extinct by about 3,000 years ago everywhere except the island of Tasmania, off Australia's southeast corner. A population had been isolated there, cut ...