An 1817 painting of the Tasmanian tiger. The carnivorous marsupial was first described, officially, in 1808 and while some sketches are anatomically accurate, others, like this painting, were poor representations.

Read the story

Four Tasmanian tigers at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart in the 1930s. The private zoo closed in 1937. Hunting has largely been attributed to the main cause of the marsupial’s demise.

Read the story

An 1869 hand-tinted drawing of a Tasmanian tiger by Victor A. Prout. Because the Tassie tiger went extinct in the 1930s, there are just a few photos and drawings of the species in existence.

Read the story

Two Tasmanian tigers at the Beaumaris Private Zoo in Hobart in the 1930s. The thylacines are known, from fossil records, to have inhabited mainland Australia and parts of Papua New Guinea. The species was thought to have been extinct from the mainland after competition from dingoes. In Tasmania, thlyacines were known to live from 1200-m mountain tops to the coast.

Read the story

An 1808 sketch from the Transactions of the Linnean Society of London of the Tasmanian devil and Tasmanian tiger. This was the first official scientific description of the carnivorous marsupial, by George Harris, surveyor-general of Van Diemen’s Land. In Greek, the scientific name, Thylacinus cynocephalus, means ‘dog-headed, pouched one’.

Read the story

A Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus) with a chicken in its jaws. While the natural prey items of this pedator were kangaroos and wallabies, it also ate livestock when the opportunity arose.

Read the story

An historic illustration of Tasmanian tigers and a wombats, the two marsupials with backwards-facing pouches.

Read the story

A female thylacine and her pups at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart. The private zoo closed in 1937. Like the wombat, the thylacine had a backwards-facing pouch and their young developed inside its protection. Females usually had litters of three to four pups.

Read the story

Circa 1910. A family poses with a thylacine skin in the foreground.

After the Van Diemen’s Land Company lobbied to put a bounty on thylacine heads in 1830, the Tasmanian Government followed suit in 1888. Between 188 and 1912, more than 2000 thylacines were hunted and killed. By 1936 the species was extinct.

Read the story

A man feeds a Tasmanian tiger (thylacine) at the Beaumaris Private Zoo in Hobart, which closed in 1937. The thylacine diet mainly consisted of wallabies and kangaroos.

Read the story

Alb Quarrell holding his prized thylacine kill in Fitzgerald in Tasmania, in 1912. The dog-like marsupials were a target for famers, who saw them as a threat to agriculture. The Van Diemen’s Land Company was instrumental in putting a bounty on the creatures in 1830, which accelerated their decline.

Read the story

The last captive Tasmanian tiger yawns in its cage at the Hobart Zoo – note the unusually wide gape. When it died on 7 September 1936, the species became officially extinct.

Read the story

Circa 1869, this photograph show a man, presumably by the name of Weaver, with his thylacine kill. Catching thylacines typically involved the use of guns, but often hunters used snares, where a loop on the end would be slung around the thylacine’s neck and tightened.

Read the story

The last Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus) in captivity. It died at the Beaumaris Private Zoo in Hobart in 1936. The last animal captured in the wild was shot at Mawbanna in 1930.

Read the story