The Tassie Tiger is the subject of a scientific first.
Ribonucleic acid’s been extracted from a Thylacine in Sweden, for the first time in an extinct species, the last known example dying in Hobart in 1936.
Millions of RNA strands were removed from the skin and muscle of a 132 year old Tassie Tiger kept in the Swedish Museum of Natural History.
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RNA provides more information about an organism than DNA because of its role in synthesising proteins and regulating cell metabolisms.
The new insight should be very useful in projects aiming to bring the Thylacine back to life.
What this case also raises is the circumstances around a Thylacine specimen winding up in a Stockholm Museum in 1891 the other side of the world from Tasmania.
