![]() Northern Hemisphere mammals were considered superior in every way to Australian marsupials that early observers deemed “helpless, deformed and monstrous works of nature.” Today’s much loved koala was derided as “uncouth … awkward and unwieldy,” and the thylacine, the world’s largest marsupial predator to survive into modern times, was dismissed as a primitive scavenger, “brutish” and “stupid.” Unauthorized use is prohibited.Įuropeans pinned various names to the animal-zebra opossum, marsupial wolf, Tasmanian dingo-out of colonial prejudice as much as ignorance. A party of Tasman’s sailors looking for fresh water saw the footprints of creatures “having claws like a tiger.” In his search for exploitable southern lands in 1642, Tasman fetched up on the eastern shores of the island he called Van Diemen’s Land (later renamed Tasmania in his honor but also known by its traditional Aboriginal name, lutruwita). The Dutch explorer and navigator Abel Tasman spawned the tiger meme. In its existence as in its demise, the animal also known as the thylacine was a victim of European misunderstanding and error. The first thing to say about the Tasmanian tiger is that it wasn’t a tiger and it didn’t live only in Tasmania. Not literally alive-there hasn’t been a verified sighting of Australia’s iconic marsupial predator for close to a century-but alive in imagination, in memory, in cultural recognition, and in collective regret over its extinction.Īlive, too, in the quest of a handful of scientists and entrepreneurs to “de-extinct” the species and bring it back to the wild.
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