Researchers often think about how and when their results will be published. However, many research projects don’t see the light until decades (or even centuries) later, if at all.
This is the case of a high-resolution atlas of the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine brain. Carefully processed over 140 years ago, it is finally published recently in the journal PNAS.
SIMILAR, BUT NOT WOLVES
Thylacines were dingo-sized carnivorous marsupials that roamed through Australia and New Guinea prior to human occupation. They became confined to Tasmania around 3,000 years ago.
The arrival of European colonists and the introduction of farming, diseases, and hunting bounties quickly led to their extinction. The last known individual died on September 7, 1936, at Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo. As a commemoration, September 7 became the National Threatened Species Day to raise conservation awareness in Australia.
Thylacines looked remarkably similar to wolves and dogs (that is, canids). This is a textbook example of a process known as evolutionary convergence: when the body shapes of animals are really similar, despite them coming from different lineages.
However, whether thylacine brains are also similar to wolves has been very hard to find out due to a lack of material available for microscopic studies. In the newly published study, my colleagues and I uploaded high-resolution images to a public repository and studied brain sections prepared for microscopy from a thylacine that died in the Berlin Zoo in 1880. READ MORE...
