The Tasmanian Tiger officially became extinct in 1986, despite the death of the last known thylacine in Hobart Zoo in 1936. Thanks to continual advances in modern technology, scientists are closer than ever to bringing the iconic Australian marsupial, as well as other species, back to life, the Daily Telegraph reported. Andrew Pask, a biologist from the University of Melbourne, was part of a team who worked for 10 years to successfully sequence the entire genome of a Tasmanian tiger, also known as a thylacine, with the help of a four-week-old joey preserved in a different solution to other damaged specimens. Prof Pask referred to the preserved joey as the “the Holy Grail” specimen and allowed researchers to piece together the full picture of the marsupial’s “genetic blueprint”. “It gave us so much information about what was unique about the thylacine. We learned more about its biology, we learned about its population structure over time, we also learned more about where it sits and how it related (biologically) to other marsupials” he said. In particular, a cloning technique pioneered by Harvard geneticist George Church which is not too dissimilar to that imagined in Jurassic Park is at the forefront of the de-extinction movement. His team is working to bring back the mammoth by using the DNA of its closest living relative, the Asian elephant, to essentially fill in the gaps of the mammoth DNA. “That’s something that’s not science fiction any more, it’s science fact,” Prof Pask said. “They will be able to bring something mammoth-like back to life.” And it could one day open the floodgates for resurrecting other lost species. The closest living relative to the thylacine, is the numbat, but there are many differences in the two species. 'You would have to make a lot more changes to make the numbat DNA look like a thylacine but the technology for making those changes has gotten exponentially easier in the last five or so years because of the people who are doing the mammoth work,' Professor Pask said.
Biologists at the University of Melbourne announce plans to clone the extinct thylacine (Tasmanian tiger).