September 7th - Last Thylacine Dies In Captivity 1936

Monday, September 7, 1936. :   The last known Thylacine, or Tasmanian Tiger, dies.      The Thylacine is, or was, a carnivorous marsupial living in Australia, specifically the island of Tasmania, up until the twentieth century. It is believed that the Thylacine existed on the Australian mainland until the introduction of the dingo. Although the Thylacine is often called the Tasmanian Tiger or Tasmanian Wolf, it is neither of these. Its body was similar in shape to that of the placental wolf, but it was a marsupial, putting it in an entirely different class. It stood about 60cm tall, with a body length of up to 130cm, not including its tail, up to 66cm long. With the arrival of the European settlers in Tasmania, the Thylacine was doomed. Farmers shot the creatures, fearing their threat to livestock, while hunters prized them as trophies; these acts were supported by the government of the time which offered a bounty of one pound for every dead adult Thylacine and ten shillings for each dead Thylacine joey. The last known specimen of the Thylacine died in the Hobart Zoo on 7 September 1936. The last captive animals were exhibited in zoos, where their needs were not understood, and the Thylacines in Hobart died from exposure. Despite numerous apparent "sightings" over the years, not one of these has ever been confirmed, and the Thylacine is now officially classified as Extinct. 1. The Thylacine had a pouch in BOTH sexes The Thylacine was one of only two marsupials to have a pouch in both sexes (the other being the water opossum). The male Thylacine had a pouch that acted as a protective sheath, covering his external reproductive organswhile he ran through thick brush.The female thylacine had a pouch with four teats, but unlike many other marsupials, the pouch opened to the rear of its body. Males had a scrotal pouch, unique amongst the Australian marsupials, into which they could withdraw their scrotal sac 2. The Thylacine had strange feet Thylacine footprints could be distinguished from other native or introduced animals; unlike foxes, cats, dogs, wombats or Tasmanian devils. Thylacines had a very large rear pad and four obvious front pads, arranged in almost a straight line. The hindfeet were similar to the forefeet but had four digits rather than five. Their claws were non-retractable. 3. White settlers killed over 2000 Thylacines in Tasmania The Thylacine survived into the 1930s on the island state of Tasmania. They were rarely sighted during this time but slowly began to be credited with numerous attacks on sheep. This led to the establishment of bounty schemes in an attempt to control their numbers. The Van Diemen’s Land Company introduced bounties on the thylacine from as early as 1830, and between 1888 and 1909 the Tasmanian government paid £1 per head. (the equivalent of £100 or more today) for dead adult thylacines and ten shillings for pups. In all they paid out 2,184 bounties, but it is thought that many more thylacines were killed than were claimed for. The last known thylacine to be killed in the wild was shot in 1930 by Wilf Batty, a farmer from Mawbanna, in the northeast of the state. The animal, believed to have been a male, had been seen around Batty’s house for several weeks. 4. The last captive Thylacine died in 1936 The last captive thylacine, later referred to as “Benjamin”, was trapped in the Florentine Valley by Elias Churchill in 1933, and sent to the Hobart Zoo where it lived for three years. The thylacine died on 7 September 1936. It is believed to have died as the result of neglect—locked out of its sheltered sleeping quarters, it was exposed to a rare occurrence of extreme Tasmanian weather: extreme heat during the day and freezing temperatures at night. The thylacine features in the last known motion picture footage of a living specimen: 62 seconds of black-and-white footage showing the thylacine in its enclosure in a clip taken in 1933, by naturalist David Fleay.