Scientists Tested a Tasmanian Tiger Joey’s DNA — And Found Something Nobody Expected

For almost a century, the Tasmanian tiger's story seemed settled: a big, wolf-like sheep killer, shot out of existence, with the last one filmed pacing a Hobart zoo in 1933. The evidence tells a more complicated story, starting with the film itself. Researchers still disagree on whether it shows the last thylacine or the one before. Then scientists read the genome of a thylacine joey preserved in alcohol for more than a century. It suggests the species' effective population size and genetic diversity had been shrinking since somewhere between 70,000 and 120,000 years ago, long before Europeans reached Tasmania and before people reached Australia. So how did it survive that long, and what finally ended it? In this episode: the joey in the jar and what its genome can and can't tell us, the disputed identity of the last thylacine, the staged chicken photograph, what was really killing Tasmania's sheep, the 2020 body-mass study, the 2026 skull study that points to a fast, snapping bite, the extinction model that needs no disease, the 2026 Arnhem Land rock art, the 1,237-record sightings model, an eDNA test built from a museum joey, and which de-extinction claims have actually been independently checked. 📁 FREE Frontier Evidence File for this episode: the full timeline, an evidence board that labels every study as measured, modeled or inferred, the extinction suspects, the "still alive?" scorecard, a myth-vs-evidence table, and a de-extinction reality check. Download it here: drive.google.com/file/d/1ciL_E21SfwExJNJPD1fhxkPN5X3fK56I/view?usp=sharing TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:40 The joey in the jar 2:54 A ring of keys: lost diversity 6:35 The photo that lied and the bounty 10:17 Was it really a sheep killer? 12:03 What the skull revealed 15:08 Why the crash? Disease vs sheep 16:43 Mainland, Arnhem Land and sightings 20:05 eDNA, RNA and de-extinction 22:18 The verdict Key sources: Feigin et al. (2018), Nature Ecology & Evolution: the thylacine genome Weisbecker et al. (2026), Nature Communications: skull morphology and biting style Prowse et al. (2013), Journal of Animal Ecology: an extinction model without disease Brook et al. (2023), Science of the Total Environment: when and where the thylacine went extinct Taçon et al. (2026), Archaeology in Oceania: thylacine paintings in Arnhem Land Paddle & Medlock (2023) and Linnard & Sleightholme (2023), Australian Zoologist: the debate over the last thylacine If a lab builds an animal that looks and hunts like a thylacine but started life as an edited dunnart, is it a thylacine? Tell me in the comments. #TasmanianTiger #Thylacine #Tasmania #DeExtinction #FrontierEvidence #WildlifeScience #ExtinctAnimals