Tasmania Wiped Out Its Tiger for Killing Sheep — 90 Years Later, Its Skull Says It Wasn't Built for That — Woody Magazine, Sept. 7, 2026

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Tasmania Wiped Out Its Tiger for Killing Sheep — 90 Years Later, Its Skull Says It Wasn't Built for That — Woody Magazine, Sept. 7, 2026
Woody Magazine
We write the things that aren't news
Sept. 7, 2026 (Mon.)
ScienceSept. 7, 2026

Tasmania Wiped Out Its Tiger for Killing Sheep — 90 Years Later, Its Skull Says It Wasn't Built for That

The last thylacine died 90 years ago tonight. Last week, Australian researchers published the largest set of measurements ever taken of its skull.

In Three Lines
  1. On the night of Sept. 7, 1936, the last known thylacine died of exposure in a Hobart zoo. Tasmania had declared the species protected 59 days earlier.
  2. For 21 years the government paid a bounty on the animal as a sheep killer. Last week a team measured 73 thylacine skulls and found jaws suited to fast snapping bites at small prey, not to pinning down something as large as a struggling sheep.
  3. That does not mean it never took a sheep. It means nobody checked the charge, and by the time anyone could, the only thylacines left to measure were in museum drawers.

On the night of Sept. 7, 1936, at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Tasmania, an old female thylacine spent the night outside her shelter. The temperature dropped hard overnight, and she died of exposure.

The zoo had no record of her arrival. Four months earlier, a trapper named Elias Churchill had caught her in a ground snare, which was illegal, and sold her to the zoo quietly. Neither party wanted paperwork. Her body went to the Tasmanian Museum, where it was never catalogued. There would presumably be another one. There wasn't. In the 90 years since, no one has seen a living thylacine.

Something wolf-shaped moved in next to the sheep

The thylacine was a dog-sized carnivorous marsupial. It had dark stripes across the back, a stiff tail, and a pouch for its young, like a kangaroo's. The stripes earned it the name Tasmanian tiger. It had once lived across mainland Australia but vanished there long before Europeans arrived, and by the 1800s perhaps 5,000 remained on the island of Tasmania. Then British settlers brought sheep.

Put a wolf-shaped predator in the bush beside a paddock, and when sheep go missing, the conclusion writes itself. The settlers came from a country where wolves had taken sheep for centuries. The scientists of the day saw the same thing they did. The second half of the animal's Latin name, cynocephalus, means "dog-headed." To farmer and naturalist alike, this was a wolf with stripes.

The charge became law

Landowners were pooling money for thylacine skins as early as the 1830s. In 1888 the Tasmanian government took over: one pound for an adult, ten shillings for a pup. A farmers' lobby had petitioned parliament, saying they could not farm with the animal around. According to Kathryn Medlock, curator of vertebrate zoology at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, the bill passed by a single vote. That one vote ran for 21 years. By the time the bounty ended in 1909, the government had paid out 2,184 bounties. Researchers assume many more were killed and never claimed.

The last recorded shooting of a wild thylacine was in 1930. Only then did opinion turn. Just two or three more were ever taken alive, and one of them was the female in Hobart. On July 10, 1936, the government declared the species fully protected. Fifty-nine days later, the female in Hobart died. The species was not officially declared extinct until 1986. In the years between, people kept searching, convinced one was still out there.

59 days
from legal protection to the death of the last known animal

That is the story we know: a colony that repented too late. But there is something missing from this trial, and it was missing from the start. No one ever examined the evidence: whether the animal's jaws could actually do what it stood accused of.

The examiner's report arrived last week

On Aug. 31, a team led by Vera Weisbecker of Flinders University published its findings in Nature Communications. The researchers took calipers to 73 thylacine skulls held in museums around the world, the largest sample ever measured. They compared them with 3D scans of 60 species of carnivorous mammals, from wolves and jackals to foxes.

A predator that takes large prey needs a short, wide, heavy head. Once it bites, the animal underneath fights back, and that struggle twists the jaw sideways; short, thick bone is what resists twisting. A wolf's skull is built that way. The thylacine's was the opposite. Its snout was long, narrow and unusually tall. Yet the whole skull was strangely big. The animal weighed about 17 kilograms, roughly 37 pounds, but its skull was the size you would expect on something between 25 and 67 kilograms. It matched a gray wolf's.

A long jaw works like a long arm: swing it through the same angle and the tip travels farther, faster.

The researchers read that combination this way. A long jaw closes fast, because the tip has farther to travel for the same movement at the hinge, and a fast bite lands with more impact. The oversized skull is the frame that absorbs it. Around the canines the snout flares wide and then pinches sharply behind them, which loads mass toward the front and packs bone around the teeth that take the hit. A tall, narrow snout copes well with force from above and badly with force from the side. In plain terms, this was a jaw for snapping up small, quick prey in an instant, and not a jaw for holding down something large that fights back. The team puts the thylacine's likely prey at around 45 percent of its own body weight. An adult sheep weighs more than a thylacine did.

No living carnivorous mammal has this set of features. The nearest working parallels are animals like crocodiles that catch prey with a fast, long-snouted snap. So the thylacine resembled a wolf as far as the face went. What it did with that face was something else.

Why it looked like a wolf

A thylacine is closer kin to a kangaroo than to a dog. Marsupials and placental mammals split somewhere between 122 million and 166 million years ago, long before the dinosaurs died out. Two lineages that far apart chased similar prey and ended up with similar faces. The settlers looked at the face and saw the wolves of home; the scientists looked at the face and wrote "dog-headed." We are in no position to sneer. The tools to measure 73 skulls against 60 species did not exist in 1888.

But one thing needs saying. Where did those 73 skulls come from? Most came from animals that died during the hunting years and were sold on to museums in Europe and Australia. The people who carried out the sentence supplied the material for the report that undercuts it. And one specimen was missing even from that: the last animal herself. Because the zoo never recorded buying her, the museum never flagged her remains, and her skin ended up in a traveling school kit, where children were allowed to pat it. The fur still shows the flattened patches. In 2022, researcher Robert Paddle and curator Medlock finally identified her skin and bones in a cupboard in the museum's education office. She had been dead 86 years.

One of the paper's co-authors, Andrew Pask of the University of Melbourne, is working with the U.S. company Colossal Biosciences on bringing the species back from its genome. If that animal ever exists, the jaws measured last week will say what it eats.

The Last Word

The trial ended in 1888. The examiner's report came last week. The defendant has been gone for 90 years. Tasmania never checked what the animal ate. It only checked what the animal looked like.

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