A multimillion-dollar project is in the works to bring back a tiger that died in the 1930s.
The thylacine, a Tasmanian tiger, was the only marsupial apex predator in Australia’s Tasmania island.
European colonizers wrongly blamed the wolflike creature for killing sheep and chickens, according to Scientific American.
The problem escalated when the Tasmanian Parliament placed a bounty of 1 pound on the species. The last known thylacine spent its last days in a zoo and died of neglect, only two months after the species was granted protected status.
This is Colossal Biosciences’ second de-extinction project. The Texas-based startup announced back in September that it is planning to bring back the woolly mammoth by altering the DNA of Asian elephants.
“The challenges ahead of us are engineering challenges, they’re not science challenges,” said Ben Lamm, co-founder of Colossal, per CNET.
In partnership with the University of Melbourne, the team of scientists sequenced the genome of a specimen possessed by Museums Victoria and now, through gene editing, they will be able to resurrect the thylacine.
“The Tasmanian tiger is an incredible animal,” Andrew Pask, a biosciences professor at the University of Melbourne who is leading the thylacine project, told Fast Company.
Technically, the thylacine isn’t a tiger but a marsupial, a mammal that carries its babies in a pouch, Pask said. They do have tiger-like stripes.
The animal is highly essential to Tasmania’s ecosystem because it’s the only apex predator in that animal group, he said.
“When you lose those apex predators, it throws that entire ecosystem beneath it completely out of balance,” Pask said.