LAST THYLACINE REDISCOVERED (PROBABLY)
The remains of the last recorded living thylacine, which died in Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Tasmania, on 7 September 1936, were long thought to have been lost. They were known to have been passed to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), but for years “many museum curators and researchers searched for its remains without success,” said thylacine researcher Dr Robert Paddle. “No thylacine material dating from 1936 had been recorded in the zoological collection, and so it was assumed its body had been discarded.” However, Paddle, along with TMAG curator of vertebrate zoology Dr Kathryn Medlock, found an unpublished internal report from the museum’s taxidermist that showed he had worked on a thylacine specimen in 1936/37, so they carried out a review of the thylacine skins and skeletons in the TMAG. “We tried to work out which specimens we could trace to something. There was just a skeleton and flat skin left over,” Medlock said. These had been used as education specimens because in 1936 no one realised that they came from the last known thylacine: at the
