Colorized Thylacine Footage

Thylacine skull By: W. S. Berridge From: The Book of the Animal Kingdom 1910

You know what? That's it.

**Tasmanians your tiger**

Here’s a nice thylacine photograph I personally hadn’t seen before. From Eric Guiler’s book “Tasmanian Tiger: A Lesson to be Learnt.”

Photo caption in the book states that it’s a male at the Beaumaris Zoo.

Halloween art piece:)

Enjoy

Also if you understand the tombstones, kudos!!!!

The tiny skull of a thylacine joey, part of the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Prior to her premature death, this individual lived alongside her mother and two siblings at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park. [ x ]

⭐️✨🌟💫🐾✨🌟⭐️💫

This is an adult male thylacine taxidermy from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. The most striking aspect of this mount is the little fangs - they may not be anatomically correct, but they’re pretty cute and give him a unique look :)

Unfortunately there is no information about where this specimen came from, the date it was collected or who donated it to the museum.

The mount is in fair to poor condition, with significant damage on the ears, belly, medial aspects of the legs, and near the base of the tail. The white band was placed around the belly in an effort to prevent the skin from cracking further. I did my best to show only his good side, but he’s in need of some serious restorative work. It’s a shame because his facial expression, pose and color are all quite good.

Eternal thanks to @diplotomodon for alerting me to the existence of this specimen!

(My main blog, @sixth-extinction is listed on the images.)

thylacines made good pets?? ;_; they do look like they'd feel soft and glossy to the touch. I'm obsessed with tassie devils, myself, but I'm resigned that they may go extinct before I can travel far enough to see them. I wish I could pet one.

They were obviously not domesticated to the level of having domestication syndrome features (not that I'm sure a marsupial animal *would*), but there are historical records of Tasmanians who kept them as pets, including both white settlers and indigenous people.

Thylacines were somewhat prone to capture myopathy (a stress reaction that causes some animals to die if trapped/captured) and sometimes died after capture, but many did not. If the animals were treated kindly they would generally respond well to attempts to tame them, and this was even more true of orphaned baby thylacines that were raised by humans. There are several stories of people who tamed thylacines very shortly after capture. One such thylacine was let go when she went into season and became restless, and she later introduced her pups to the man she had lived with.

Indigenous people were recorded as having kept them. One indigenous informant stated that they called them "stripey dogs" when they spoke English.

One of my favourite stories was of a white settler family had a large house and kept their thylacine on an extremely long chain in the front so that she could act as a sort of watchdog. This thylacine would watch over the children playing and did not react violently to them even if she was accidentally hit by a ball (she knew that this was an accident) and would give warning of anyone approaching.

The likely reason that thylacines did not become popular household companions was the hate campaign that sprung up around them, stating that they were sheep killers. Once that got to be a big issue and bounties were offered for killing them, people who were taming and raising the animals frequently found them killed, and they gave up on it.

Many of these stories are in Robert Paddle's book, which is an academic study but is extremely readable.

Model of thylacine with mouth agape, displayed at the Kitakyushu Museum of Natural History and Human History in Fukuoka, Japan.

Via @hakubutu on Twitter.

BRUH????