The Tasmanian Tiger Shouldn't Be Extinct... Here's Why

The Tasmanian tiger was not a tiger. It was not a wolf. It was a marsupial predator so perfectly designed that evolution built the same body plan twice, 160 million years apart, on opposite sides of the planet. It survived ice ages, continental shifts, and the loss of an entire continent. Then European settlers arrived in Tasmania, blamed it for killing sheep it almost certainly never touched, and paid a one-pound bounty for every one brought in dead. The last thylacine died of neglect in a zoo in 1936, 59 days after the government finally made it illegal to kill them. Now a biotech company is spending billions trying to bring it back.