Australia’s colonists, followed by citizens of the newly autonomous Commonwealth, hunted the nation’s iconic Tasmanian tiger, Thylacinus cynocephalus, to extinction 90 years ago—seemingly because of a fatal case of mistaken identity. The thylacine, a marsupial whose dog-like anatomy led to it sometimes being called the Tasmanian wolf, also led to unfounded fears that these creatures would prey upon livestock—just like the wolfpacks these farmers knew back home in Europe.
Since then, it hasn’t exactly been easy to confirm the true eating habits of this species, eradicated before its time by hostile farmers and their belligerent defenders. But a dramatic new interpretation of the thylacine’s skull anatomy has revealed more about not only what the thylacine once ate but also the unusual way in which these creatures caught their fresh kills. The Tasmanian tiger, according to this new study in Nature Communications, snatched smallish prey like bandicoots via a powerful, high-speed lethal snap not unlike a crocodile’s.
“Many crocodiles and predatory fishes have long, fast-snapping jaws used to catch agile prey like fish. Their jaws are often much longer and frequently sport tall, widened tips,” as the study’s lead author, evolutionary biologist Vera Weisbecker, explained in a statement.
“We think that the thylacine’s huge skull size allowed it to withstand these bite forces,” Weisbecker added. “The longer a jaw is, the faster its tip moves when an animal bites. This increases the impact of the strike.”
A rare breed
If correct, Weisbecker and her colleagues’ analysis would make the thylacine the only known mammal capable of killing via this powerful head-snapping bite. The researchers analyzed 3D scans and digital reconstructions of a total of 225 specimens from 14 families of mammal, including the thylacine, to better understand how its anatomy differed from other species and why.
The Tasmanian tiger, despite being considerably smaller than a wolf, typically had a large head comparable to the wolf’s head size and shape. This unusual case of parallel evolution was striking, as the team wrote in its study, because these two distant groups of mammals are “separated by 122–166 million years of evolution.”
“But while it was big, it wasn’t really shaped like the skull of a big predator,” study coauthor and paleobiologist Douglass Rovinsky said in a statement. “Instead, the thylacine’s snout was long and slender, almost delicate—not robust like the snout of a gray wolf. It very much looks like the snout of a fox or jackal, which can be much smaller than thylacines.”
Crass extinction event
Weisbecker is (understandably) unsparing in her view on the colonial-era stereotyping that led to the Tasmanian tiger’s extinction around the turn of the previous century into the 1930s. She describes it as a preventable tragedy, “a story of ignorance and lack of respect for Australia’s unique wildlife and its Indigenous custodians.”
Writing with Rovinsky and their coauthors in The Conversation, Weisbecker advised that researchers and conservationists should remember that “Western science is only part of the story.”
“[Respectfully] requesting knowledge from Indigenous custodians about the unique Australian wildlife should be key to our future research,” Weisbecker and her colleagues said. “After all, the people who lived alongside thylacines for tens of thousands of years knew exactly what kind of animal it was.”
