BehindMyShadow: The Quest For the Tasmanian Tiger
The Quest For the Tasmanian Tiger .
「 And this post was done at. 6:23 AM 」

The Tasmanian tiger, a creature that's meant to be extinct-but there have been many sightings of the animal, and scientists are also trying to clone it. Will the exotic beast that has enchanted wildlife lovers return to the world?

Unlike the Loch Ness Monster, the bunyip or the Abominable Snowman, the Tasmanian tiger DID exist. Once a common sight on the Australian mainland, the tiger made its final habitat in Tasmania, an island lying 225 kilometres off the south coast of Australia.[Benjamin (in the picture above), was the last Tasmanian tiger to die in captivity.]

Retired potter Edward Carr is one of the very few people alive to have seen a Tasmanian tiger.
Now in his nineties, he said: "We used to walk down to Beaumaris Zoo at weekends. The tiger was in a little cage half the size of this room. It used to wander backwards and forwards."
The death of Benjamin, as the "last" of the species was called, from pleuropneumonia on a cold night on the 7th of September, cause such small comment that it was not even recorded in the local newspapers. All that remained of Benjamin, whos pelt and bones were tossed away with the rubbish, was a muted 62- second clip of black and white film taken by the man who was bitten on the buttock while handling the camera. The footage also shows Benjamin to have been female.

Benjamin may have been the last Tasmanian tiger to die in captivity, but hardly a mouth passes without someone claiming to have spotted a live specimen in the wild. Since 1936, there has been more than 4000 sightings of the Tasmanian tigerin the wild. It has also been calculated that every third Tasmanian has a story that confirms the continued survival of the Thylacinus cynocephalus [ The real name of the Tasmanian tiger].

The Tasmanian tiger leapt from truth into myth before everyone's eyes. From the labels on bottles of Cascade beer to the logos of the Launceston city council and Tasmania's Local television channel, its distinct outline tracks you at every turn. Yet all the sightings from 1936 have not produce any concrete evidence that the species survived, despite rewards. In March 2005, there was a flurry of excitement when The Bulletin offered a reward of AUDI1.25 million for a photograph that showed a live, uninjured thylacine.

Soon, a German tourist claimed to have caught such a specimen with his digital camera in southwest Tasmania. these photos were shown to Nick Mooney, the Parks and Wildlife officer who investigated Naarding's (Hans Naarding was a man who had came face to face with a Tasmanian tiger in 1982) sightings. However, the images did absolutely nothing to alter Mooney's conclusion.
"The overwhelming evidence is that the thylacine is extinct." (On September 7, 1986 the Tasmanian tiger had been officially declared extinct)
However, there was an incredible news - an announcement that Australian and American scientists had succeeded in extracting a gene from a 19th century Tasmanian tiger pup(preserved in ethanol since 1866) and made it work in a mouse embryo. The fact that the thylacine gene has successfully activatd cartilage in a live creature and that the the tiger's surrogate mother might one day be a mouse provokes a derisive responce from experts such as Nick Mooney. He does not support scientists who seek to clone the thylacine and believes that techonology should be used to prevent extinction instead.

The cloned DNA will not have the innate behavior of the thylacine and there is nothing in its habitat that will allow it to learn it. Most likely it will have the innate behavior of its host creature, a mouse. The result of the cloning will therefore, most likely create a thylacine that looks like a Tasmanian tiger but behaves like a mouse.

For many people there are things much more exciting than the prospect of creating a Tasmanian tiger with a timid voice, finding a thylacine still alive in its natural habitat. However, the chances of finding one is slim, but people like Hans Naarding are not giving up. For years Naarding has been searching for thylacines, often going bush-walking and even spending weeks out there, but he still has not seen the slightest sign of a thylacine. Not yet.

With such amazing determination, these Tasmanian tiger "hunters" will never give up, if i was one of them i would not too. So, the quest for the Tasmanian tiger goes on, nobody knowing when it will ever end.