From: mike havard (havard@earthlink.net)
Date: Thu May 13 1999 - 16:21:17 MDT
>From ABCnews.com
C A N B E R R A, May 13 — Australia’s Tasmanian Tiger, a marsupial wolf believed to be extinct, may be reborn in only a few years with geneticists cloning it from perfectly preserved baby “tigers” kept in museums.
Australian Museum director Mike Archer said the discovery of a baby “tiger” preserved in a jar in his Sydney museum had encouraged him over the past year to investigate the possibility of bringing the wolf back to life using its DNA.
His Jurassic Park-style plan was reinforced on Thursday when six other baby Tasmanian tigers, also known as the thylacine, were revealed in other museums, meaning a greater gene pool could be used and boosting the animal’s chances of future survival.
Just Waiting for a ‘Kickstart’
“I’ve found out that there’s a total of seven thylacines around the world, so this isn’t the only one — there’s a population waiting to be kickstarted,” Archer said.
“There’s been several geneticists who are now saying it’s not a joke, it’s not silly, it could be done.”
La Trobe University’s senior lecturer in genetics, Mike Westerman, said it was possible the thylacine could be cloned in the “not-too-distant future” if the funds were available. Archer said he was prepared to hand the baby “tiger” over to anyone with a serious cloning proposal.
Sydney’s pouch-young thylacine was plonked into its jar in 1866 and was preserved in alcohol rather than formalin, which would have destroyed its DNA.
Spread Out in U.S., UK and Tasmania
There were thylacines stored in alcohol in the British Museum in London and in American museums as well as several in a museum in Australia’s island state, Tasmania.
Archer said he had previously thought it feasible that Tasmanian Tigers, which grew to about 6 feet long including a long rigid tail, and have tapering stripes on their bodies, could be sold as pets within 50 years.
But some geneticists had suggested it may happen in only a few years. “The important thing is it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when,” he said.
Restitution for Earlier Hunting
Australia had a moral duty to revive the Tasmanian tiger, which looked similar to a wild dog, after early British settlers in Tasmania mercilessly hunted it down to stop it killing flocks of sheep, he said.
The last known Tasmanian tiger was captured in 1933 and died in a zoo in the Tasmanian capital of Hobart in 1936. There have been numerous reported sightings of apparent thylacines since then in both Tasmania and on the mainland, but no evidence has ever been found to prove they still existed.
Thylacines once roamed the Australian mainland and New Guinea but are thought to have lost out in competition with the wild dogs introduced by man into both places thousands of years ago and to have become extinct long before white settlement.
Copyright 1999 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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