The last known Tasmanian tiger died on 7 September 1936 at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Tasmania. The animal was locked out of its sheltered sleeping quarters and exposed to freezing overnight temperatures. For decades, popular accounts claimed this thylacine was a male named Benjamin, but researchers confirmed in 2022 that both the name and the sex were myths. The real identity of the last thylacine was simply an unnamed animal that died from neglect.
How the Last Thylacine Died
The Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart was poorly funded and badly managed by the 1930s. On the night of 7 September 1936, the last thylacine was reportedly left exposed to harsh Tasmanian weather after being shut out of its enclosure’s sleeping den. September in Hobart is late winter, and nighttime temperatures can drop near freezing. The animal died from exposure, a grim and preventable end for the last of its species.
The thylacine had arrived at the zoo only a few years earlier, captured from the wild in 1933 or shortly before. It lived in a small concrete enclosure, pacing back and forth in a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched a stressed animal in captivity. That restless pacing was captured on film, creating some of the most haunting footage in natural history.
The Footage That Survives
Only 10 separate films of living thylacines are known to exist. The longest and most famous was shot by naturalist David Fleay at Beaumaris Zoo in December 1933. At just under 80 seconds, it shows the last thylacine walking, yawning to display its remarkable jaw gape, and pacing its enclosure. Additional footage was filmed in the same enclosure in March 1935, and a 21-second newsreel clip from that year contains the last known moving images of the species. Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive has since digitized these clips in 4K resolution and produced colorized versions, giving modern viewers a startlingly vivid look at an animal that no longer exists.
What Happened to the Remains
After the last thylacine died, its body was sent to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) for preservation. A museum taxidermist processed the specimen in 1936 or early 1937, creating a tanned flat skin and a disarticulated skeleton mounted on five educational display cards. Then, remarkably, the remains were filed away and lost in the museum’s vast collections, their significance apparently unrecognized.
For over 80 years, no one knew where the last thylacine’s body had ended up. Researchers Robert Paddle and Kathryn Medlock finally solved the mystery by tracking down an unpublished taxidermist’s report from 1936/37 that listed a thylacine among specimens processed that year. The skin and skeleton, still attached to those original education cards, were identified and placed on display in the museum’s thylacine gallery. The discovery was published in the journal Australian Zoologist.
Why the Species Disappeared
The thylacine was once widespread across mainland Australia and the island of Tasmania. It vanished from the mainland roughly 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, likely due to competition with dingoes, which were introduced by human travelers and never reached Tasmania. That island isolation kept the thylacine alive for millennia longer, but European colonization in the 1800s sealed its fate.
Tasmanian farmers blamed thylacines for killing sheep, and in 1888 the Tasmanian government introduced a bounty system. Over the next 24 years, 2,184 thylacines were presented for payment before the program ended in 1912. By then the population was devastated. Disease, habitat loss, and the introduction of domestic dogs compounded the damage. Wild sightings became increasingly rare through the 1920s, and by the early 1930s, the species was functionally gone from the landscape. The animal that died at Beaumaris Zoo in 1936 was almost certainly one of the very last alive anywhere.
The Tasmanian government did not grant the thylacine legal protection until 59 days before the last one died. The species was formally declared extinct decades later by international conservation authorities.
De-Extinction Efforts
The thylacine has become one of the leading candidates for de-extinction, the controversial effort to bring back lost species using genetic technology. Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology company, announced the completion of a high-quality genome sequence for the thylacine, assembled from preserved museum specimens. This is the first complete, high-quality reconstruction of the animal’s DNA, and it gives scientists a detailed blueprint of the thylacine’s genetic code.
The practical path from a genome sequence to a living animal remains enormously complex. Researchers would need to develop viable stem cell lines, use gene editing to modify the DNA of a closely related living species (the fat-tailed dunnart, a small marsupial), and then find a way to bring an edited embryo to term. Each of those steps involves unsolved technical challenges. Still, the genome milestone means the project has moved from speculation into active scientific work, and it has reignited public debate about whether reviving the thylacine is desirable, or even possible, within the coming decades.