Genetics lab launches project to bring back ‘Tasmanian tiger’ that died out in the 1930s

An apex predator that died out in the 1930s could be reintroduced to its native Tasmania under an ambitious “de-extinction” project.

- Adam Morton

The thylacine, a marsupial also known as the Tasmanian tiger, is the second undertaking by Colossal, a Texas-based biotechnology company that last year announced plans to recreate the woolly mammoth and return it to the Arctic tundra.

The project is a partnership with the University of Melbourne, which this year received a A$5m (£2.9m) donation to open a thylacine genetic restoration lab. The team previously sequenced the genome of a juvenile specimen held by Museums Victoria, providing what its leader, Prof Andrew Pask, called “a complete blueprint on how to essentially build a thylacine”. The thylacine was Australia’s only marsupial apex predator. It once lived across the continent, but was restricted to Tasmania about 3,000 years ago. Dog-like in appearance and with stripes across its back, it was extensively hunted after European colonisation. The last known survivor died in captivity in 1936. Despite many reported sightings in the decades that followed, it was officially declared extinct in the 1980s.

The scientists aim to reverse this by taking stem cells from a living species with similar DNA, the fat-tailed dunnart, and turning them into “thylacine” cells using gene editing expertise developed by George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and Colossal’s co-founder.