September 2006 Archives

Today is the 70th anniversary of the death of the last thylacine in captivity and the likely date of extinction of the species.

Thylacines were a carnivorous species of mammal native to Australia. In appearance they bore a lot of similarity to wild dogs, but genetically they were distant -- it was not the canine family, but the marsupials, to which this creature owed its lineage, making the thylacine a closer relative of kangaroos than dogs.

And this is something you can spot when you look at old film footage of thylacines: they look and move like dogs, but they also rear up into a kangaroo-like pose, and they have a tail that looks a lot like a kangaroo's. They also have zebra-like stripes on the rear halves of their backs and their mouths open so wide as to appear disconcertingly unnatural. They really look like something out of a Photoshop competition -- an amalgam of features from familiar but disparate animals -- but they're not lacking in cuteness either.

But no amount of words describing the thylacine can give as concrete an impression as the film clips on this page. Even though some of them are very short, I think they really paint a vivid picture of what the animal was like, in terms of appearance, movement, and even behaviour to some extent -- probably more than a whole book could. They're MPEG files and have no sound. The best are clip 5, which shows the animal's impressive jaw span (which freaks me out a little), and clip 4, which shows a thylacine responding vigorously to the actions of a zookeeper in a way not unlike a dog to its owner.

(These videos are from The Thylacine Museum, a wonderful and detailed resource on all aspects of thylacines, which has material enough for hours of browsing.)

Nothing remotely like a thylacine exists on the planet today -- it was the last species of its family Thylacinidae which included many related species through prehistory. Today its closest living relative is the Tasmanian devil. I think it's really sad that if the species had just lasted another 50 years then there would have certainly been a concerted effort to save it from extinction. The thylacine made it from prehistory to the 1930s but it fell at the last hurdle, just a few decades short of the era when people started to take wildlife conservation seriously.

Inspired by such wonderful creations as Love Pixel and Eboy I've been playing around with isometric pixel art with the impressive free pixel editor Pixen. My first attempt is a little less complex than their work.