Tasmanian Tiger

 Wolly Mammoth resurrection project-

• The ambitious project aims to reintroduce the animal to its native place Tasmania to revive the region’s lost ecological balance.
• Interestingly, this is not the first attempt to revive thylacines. 
• In 1999, an Australian scientist, Dr Michael Archer, embarked on an unsuccessful journey to resurrect the animal using cloning technology from a perfectly preserved specimen in a museum.
• Even though the last living thylacine died over 86 years ago, many embryos and young specimens of the species have been preserved.
• For the de-extinction project, the scientists led by Dr. Andrew Pask, a professor of Epigenetics Biosciences at the University of Melbourne, will be using a genome sequenced from a DNA extracted from a 108-year-old specimen held at Australia’s Victoria Museum.
• This genome will be compared with the closest living animal of the species– the fat tailed dunnart — to identify all the differences. Once all the differences are identified, scientists will engineer the living cell’s DNA where it is different, essentially engineering the extinct species back.
• The fat-tailed dunnart is a mouse-like species in the Dasyuridae family in Australia. With an average body length of 2.4–3.5 inches, they are one of the smallest carnivorous marsupials.

About Tasmanian Tiger-

• Tasmanian Tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus), the only animal in the Thylacinidae family to survive in modern times, was a marsupial mammal that raises young ones in a pouch.
• Even though the species earned its nickname Tasmanian Tiger because of the stripes along its back, it was a slow-paced carnivorous that usually hunted alone or in pairs at night. 
• The sharply clawed animal had a dog-like head and ate kangaroos, other marsupials, small rodents, and birds.
• Once widespread in the grass and woodlands of continental Australia extending north to New Guinea and south to Tasmania, the animal’s fate changed after the European Colonisation of Australia.
• The animals were reported to have eaten poultry of farmers, and were killed following official authorisation.  

• Apart from this, competition with another animal, the Dingo, is also considered a reason for its extinction.
• The last wild thylacine was killed between 1910 and 1920. Following this, the Australian government declared the thylacine a protected species in July 1936. 
• But two months after the announcement, Benjamin, the last captive animal, died at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart. The official declaration of the animal’s extinction was in the 1980s.
• The animal was at the top of the food chain, and hence played a significant role in balancing the ecosystem of its habitat by removing the weak animals and maintaining species diversity. 
• Also known as the apex predator for the same reason, its disappearance from the food chain resulted in Trophic Downgrading — causal degradation of an ecosystem that occurs when higher trophic level animals are removed from the food chain, resulting in loss or exponential growth of other species.
• Trophic Downgrading also results in disruption of biogeochemical cycles, wildfires, growth of invasive species, and carbon sequestration, among other effects.
• As the thylacine was the only apex predator in its ecosystem, its absence impacted the Tasmanian Devil, which was almost wiped out by a facial tumour disease. 
• The thylacine would have prevented this by removing sick and weak animals from the ecosystem, which would have eventually controlled the spread of the transmissible diseases.