The Tasmanian Tiger Was Branded a Livestock Killer. New Research Challenges That Myth

When European colonists settled in Tasmania some 200 years ago, they feared that thylacines, also known as Tasmanian tigers, would attack and kill their livestock. So, incentivized by government bounties, they killed as many of the striped marsupials as they could, eventually hunting them to extinction. Now, new research suggests those concerns were probably unfounded.

A new analysis of Tasmanian tiger skulls, published August 31 in the journal Nature Communications, suggests the creatures primarily hunted small or medium-sized prey like bandicoots, not larger animals like sheep and cattle. The findings challenge the myth that thylacines were “ferocious predators of livestock,” a misconception that ultimately caused the species to die out, says lead author Vera Weisbecker, an evolutionary biologist at Flinders University, in a statement. Thylacines once roamed throughout Australia.

But the species is thought to have disappeared from the mainland roughly 2,000 years ago, continuing to survive only on the Australian island of Tasmania. When European settlers began arriving in the early 1800s, an estimated 5,000 thylacines lived in Tasmania. To the colonists, the striped, semi-nocturnal animals looked a lot like the wolves they had back home.

They “tended to view unfamiliar wildlife as primitive copies of more familiar European species,” Weisbecker tells CNN’s Ashley Strickland. Based on their physical similarities, colonists also assumed thylacines behaved like wolves. Settlers began systematically killing Tasmanian tigers, until only one known individual remained in captivity in a zoo in the city of Hobart.

When that creature, an older female, died in 1936, the species was presumed extinct. However, more than 1,000 potential thylacine sightings have been reported since then, so some speculate that thylacines might have persisted in the wild well into the 20th century. Scientists recently compared the size, shape and proportions of thylacine skulls from museums around the world with those of other carnivorous species.

Thylacines only weighed about 37 pounds on average, about half as much as the average wolf. However, their skulls were about the same size as wolf skulls, giving them proportionally large heads for their body size. The striped marsupials also had long, slender, delicate snouts—not at all like the robust, sturdy snouts found on grey wolves.