Thylacines belonged to the order Dasyuromorphia, alongside quolls and the Tasmanian devil. Females carried young in a backward-opening pouch, and males had a partial pouch of their own. The skull nevertheless converged closely on canid proportions, to the point that undergraduate anatomy classes still use thylacine and wolf skulls as a matched pair.
The divergences show in the details. The thylacine could open its jaws to an unusually wide gape, its bite force relative to skull size suggests it took prey smaller than a wolf would, and its stiff tail and hindquarter stripes have no canid parallel. Genomic comparisons have since confirmed that the similarity is in shape rather than ancestry.
A Tasmanian government bounty operated from 1888 to 1909 and paid on more than two thousand animals, alongside habitat change and probable disease. The last known thylacine died at Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart on 7 September 1936. Reported sightings have continued for decades without confirmation.