The last known thylacine died at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart on the night of September 7, 1936, two months after Tasmania finally made it a crime to kill one; researchers now argue that the animal in the famous film was not the one that died

The Tasmanian government spent most of a century paying men to kill them. On July 10, 1936, it made killing one a crime.

What it could not manage was keeping the last one alive for another two months.

What was the thylacine, exactly?

A marsupial that had arrived at the shape of a dog by a separate route. It stood two feet at the shoulder, ran three to four feet from nose to rump, and carried fifteen to twenty dark stripes across its back and the base of the tail. Both sexes had a pouch: the female's held young, the male's was a flap of skin drawn over his reproductive organs.

The jaw is the part people remember. It opened to something near eighty degrees, a gape almost no other mammal matches, and the surviving films all seem to catch it doing exactly that.

Americans have had one to look at for a long time. A female shipped out of Launceston reached the Smithsonian's National Zoological Park in Washington on September 3, 1902, with three young riding in her pouch. She died two years later; her mounted skin is in the National Museum of Natural History still.

Why did the thylacine go extinct?

Sheep. Or rather, what people believed about sheep.

In 1888 the Tasmanian parliament put a price on the animal: one pound for a full-grown one, ten shillings for a pup. The scheme ran until 1909 and settled more than 2,180 claims. The real toll was higher: landholders and the Van Diemen's Land Company had been paying private bounties for decades already.

The arithmetic behind the panic was wrong. In 2020 Douglass Rovinsky, Alistair Evans and Justin Adams of Monash University 3D-scanned 93 museum specimens and put the average adult near 37 pounds in Proceedings of the Royal Society B — against the 65 pounds everyone had been working from, a figure drawn out of nineteenth-century newspaper tall tales. Below roughly 46 pounds a predator stops taking prey bigger than itself, so the animal blamed for the flocks weighed about what a border collie weighs.

The bounty was not the whole story. Introduced dogs did their share, and so did a distemper-like sickness that moved through the population in the first decade of the century. Marie Attard of the University of New South Wales found in 2011 that the skull was built for prey of a few pounds, and a population already broken up by clearing and burning had nothing to fall back on.

What happened at the Hobart zoo on September 7, 1936

Beaumaris Zoo had been Mary Grant Roberts's private collection until she died in 1921; the Hobart City Council took it over and moved the animals to a worked-out quarry on the Queens Domain in February 1923. Arthur Reid ran the place from 1922, and his daughter Alison was doing most of the work by the time he died in December 1935. Trained keepers had been swapped for relief laborers on a government sustenance scheme, and the zoo shut for good within the year.

The account handed down is that the animal was shut out of its sheltered sleeping quarters and left in the open through a night of hard frost after a warm day, and died of exposure. Nobody wrote a report.

The body went to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, where a taxidermist named William Cunningham skinned it and tanned the hide for the education collection rather than the zoological one. For decades the flat skin toured schools, and children handled it until parts of it wore smooth.

Was the last thylacine called Benjamin?

No.

In May 1968 a man named Frank Darby told the naturalist Graham Pizzey, and through him the Melbourne press, that he had been a keeper at the Hobart zoo and that the last animal was a male called Benjamin, fed live rabbits. The name went everywhere and has never come back out.

Robert Paddle, who wrote the standard history of the species, has spent years calling it an invention. Darby appears on no employment record at the zoo. Alison Reid, who was there, denied both the man and the name. Darby also called the animal voiceless, a story Paddle traces to farmers and bookmakers in the 1920s and one the keepers' own accounts contradict. "It was a female and it certainly was not called Benjamin," Paddle told the ABC in December 2022, in terms about Darby that a family newspaper had to asterisk.

The film everyone has seen may show a different animal

Here the record gets thin, and it is worth saying so.

David Fleay filmed a thylacine in its enclosure at Beaumaris in December 1933: under eighty seconds of black-and-white footage, the longest of the ten known films, and the source of nearly every moving image of it. Fleay was bitten on the backside for his trouble. In 2011 Stephen Sleightholme enlarged a single frame of that film in Australian Zoologist, found a scrotum, and concluded that the animal was male.

Then in 2022 Kathryn Medlock of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery noticed a thylacine listed in the museum's unpublished taxidermist's report for 1936–37, and traced a skin and a skeleton to a cupboard. She and Paddle published the identification the following year: an aged female, snared by a trapper named Elias Churchill in the Florentine Valley and sold to the zoo in May 1936, the sale unrecorded because ground snaring was illegal and Churchill risked a fine. On their reading, the much-filmed male died in May and the female outlived him by four months.

Gareth Linnard and Sleightholme answered in the same journal. They hold that the filmed male, caught by the Delphin family in 1930, is the only verifiable candidate, and that Paddle and Medlock's evidence is incomplete and quoted out of context. They reject the locked-out story outright: the animal was the most valuable in the collection, and the zoo went looking for a replacement at once.

So the date holds and almost nothing attached to it does. Which animal died at Beaumaris that night, and whether anyone's carelessness killed it, are both still open.

Can the thylacine be brought back?

Colossal Biosciences, in Dallas, has been trying since 2022 with Andrew Pask's laboratory at the University of Melbourne. The plan runs through the fat-tailed dunnart (a mouse-sized marsupial), which would supply both the edited cells and the womb. In October 2024 the company announced a genome built from a head that had sat in ethanol at Museums Victoria for 110 years: better than 99.9 percent accurate, it said, with 45 gaps left, plus RNA recovered from the tongue and the eye. Its dunnart cell line carries more than 300 edits; the team has induced ovulation on demand in a marsupial and grown embryos past halfway through gestation in an artificial device.

Not everyone is convinced. Parwinder Kaur has pressed for peer review before the announcements; Emilio Mármol-Sánchez, who has worked on thylacine RNA, says the product would be a modified dunnart wearing thylacine genes. Pask joined Colossal as chief biology officer in August 2025.

Meanwhile people keep seeing one. Tasmania's files hold hundreds of reports and no confirmation; the Booth Richardson Tiger Team called a press conference in 2017 with camera-trap images that the wildlife biologist Nick Mooney rated a possibility and nothing firmer.

Which is the part worth watching. A country that paid a pound a head now spends real money on undoing it, and the same gene-editing work is being aimed at the northern quoll, which is still alive and losing ground to cane toads. Whatever walks out of the Dallas laboratory, the honest measure of the project is whether anything currently breathing gets kept out of a cupboard in Hobart.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "Thylacine" and "Hobart Zoo," for the protection date, the bounty terms, the physical description and the zoo's history
• ABC News, "Stop calling the last thylacine Benjamin, Tasmanian tiger researcher says" (December 6, 2022), for Frank Darby, Graham Pizzey, Alison Reid's denial and Robert Paddle's quotes
• ABC News, "New thylacine research project casts doubt on last captive Tasmanian tiger assertions" (November 9, 2023), for Gareth Linnard and Stephen Sleightholme's rebuttal
• Australian Geographic, "Long lost last Tassie tiger remains found in museum cupboard" (December 2022), for Kathryn Medlock's find, Elias Churchill and William Cunningham's education specimen
• Douglass Rovinsky, Alistair Evans and Justin Adams, "The Tasmanian tiger was hunted to extinction as a 'large predator' — but it was only half as heavy as we thought," The Conversation (August 2020), and Marie Attard, "Why did the Tasmanian tiger go extinct?", The Conversation (January 2013)
• Smithsonian Magazine, "A 110-Year-Old Pickled Thylacine Head Helped Build the Most Complete Ancient Genome to Date, Says 'De-Extinction' Company" (October 2024), for the Colossal genome claim and its critics