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Animal profile
Thylacinus cynocephalus
The thylacine was a dog-sized carnivorous marsupial with dark stripes across the lower back and a stiff, tapering tail. It disappeared from mainland Australia thousands of years ago and survived in Tasmania until the twentieth century. The last known individual died in Hobart's Beaumaris Zoo in 1936.
The thylacine looked strikingly like a wolf, but it was a marsupial that carried its young in a pouch. Placental dogs and this marsupial carnivore last shared an ancestor well over one hundred million years ago, making the resemblance one of the clearest cases of convergence in mammals.
Its skull was so close to a wolf's that anatomists use the pair as a textbook case of convergent evolution. The two lineages had been separate for well over a hundred million years, and the thylacine carried a pouch throughout.