PRESENTED BY THE DOMESDAY BOOK OF DOGS De-extinction of the Thylacine Thylacine killed by Clem Penny. Courtesy of Libraries Tasmania, 1920. PH30/1/6303 National Library of Australia. The thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) was first sighted and recorded by European colonists in 1805, the last known specimen died in captivity in 1936. It took just one hundred and thirty-one years to completely wipe out the world’s largest extant marsupial carnivore (about the size of a medium-sized dog). The extermination was conducted on an industrial scale with seemingly wanton cruelty and even as the species was becoming scarce the killing carried on thanks to a government bounty scheme. The thylacine ate only small animals, there is even an account of an individual catching tadpoles (Paddle, 2000), yet Tasmanian’s referred to it simply as ‘the tiger’, ‘the wolf’ or ‘the hyena’ and blamed it for ravaging the sheep population when feral dogs of near plague proportions were the most likely cu