Tasmanian

November 22, 20233 min readScientists still can’t explain what is causing unusually bright explosions in space—but a surprising observation might offer cluesBy Nature magazine & Jonathan O'CallaghanAn artist’s impression of an LFBOT explosion. An explosion in space nicknamed the Tasmanian devil has confused astronomers by flashing at peak brightness more than a dozen times, months after the initial event. The observation, while posing new questions, could help to narrow down what might cause such explosions, which are…

On September 7, 2022, the Zwicky Transient Facility detected a new transient object in deep space, about one billion light-years from Earth. The object was very bright, and now, a team of astronomers believes it’s a star that’s come back from the dead.Dominic Monaghan on Attending Fan ConventionsThe object was a star: a luminous fast blue optical transient, or LFBOT for short. The star is named AT2022tsd, but affectionately called the Tasmanian Devil. Now, a team of researchers posit that the flaring activity exhibited by…

Nobody writes an obituary for the last of a species dying alone in the wild. So, knowing precisely when to confirm an extinction comes down to a mix of clever sleuthing, mathematics, and no small amount of guesswork.On 7 September 1936, a thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) held captive in a small Hobart zoo became the last Tasmanian tiger ever to be seen drawing a breath.Officially, at least. Reports of 'marsupial wolf' sightings in the rugged island wilderness continued well beyond the 1930s, gradually fading to…

The body of the last known living Tasmanian tiger was thought to be lost forever, but researchers have rediscovered the animal's preserved pelt and skeleton in a museum cupboard in Tasmania.Striped like a tiger, with a somewhat dog-like body, the Tasmanian tiger – or thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) – is in fact a large marsupial, more closely related to quolls and numbats. The pouched mammals were once found across Australia, though by the early 20th century its range was limited to Tasmania. We now know the remains…

The last known thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus, or Tasmanian tiger) died in Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo in 1936. Now, a genetic engineering company that last year announced plans to put thousands of woolly mammoths back on the Siberian steppe has added the lost marsupial wolf to its de-extinction docket.The company’s name is Colossal, and its declared aim is to bring back species wiped off the face of the planet by things like climate change (the mammoths) and humankind (the thylacine). These days, those two threats go…

The Tasmanian tiger once roamed the Australian mainland, Tasmania, and New Guinea. It first appeared around 4 million years ago and was one of the largest living carnivorous marsupials until its extinction. An extinction that was ultimately driven by humankind’s aggression. Now, a genetics company is trying to revive the Tasmania tiger and give it a second chance at life. Colossal Biosciences wants to revive the Tasmanian tiger Image source: ruskpp / AdobeThe Tasmanian tiger roamed its native environment…

The thylacine has long been an icon of human-caused extinction. In the 1800s and early 1900s, European colonizers in Tasmania wrongly blamed the dog-sized, tiger-striped, carnivorous marsupial for killing their sheep and chickens. The settlers slaughtered thylacines by the thousands, exchanging the animals’ scalps for a government bounty. The last known thylacine spent its days pacing a zoo cage in Hobart, Tasmania, and died of neglect in 1936. Now the wolflike creature—also known as the Tasmanian tiger—is poised to…