Remains of last Tasmanian tiger thought to have gone missing found in drawer 85 years later

The remains of the last Tasmanian tiger, considered missing for 85 years, have been found hidden in an Australian museum cupboard.

The animal died in captivity at the Hobart Zoo (the capital of the State of Tasmania, an island located in southern Australia) in 1936, and its body was donated to a local museum.

Also called the Tasmanian tiger or Tasmanian wolf, the thylacine got its nickname from the stripes on its back. But it was actually a marsupial, a species of Australian mammal that raises its young in a pouch.

What happened to his skeleton and skin afterwards gave birth to a decades-long mystery.

The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery has lost track of the animal’s remains – they were believed to have been discarded.

Has new research found that they’ve actually been in the museum all this time? preserved but not properly cataloged.

“For years, many museum curators and researchers have successfully searched for these remains, as no thylacine material has been recorded dating back to 1936,” said Robert Paddle, who published a book on the species’ extinction in 2000.

“It was supposed to be thrown.”

But Paddle and one of the museum’s curators found an unpublished taxidermist report requesting a review of the museum’s collections.

They found the missing female specimen in a cupboard in the museum’s education section.

These remains were even shown at a traveling exhibition in Australia, but the team didn’t know it was the last thylacine, curator Kathryn Medlock told ABC.

“It was chosen because it was the best leather in the collection,” he explained.

“At the time, they thought there were still animals in the bushes.”

The skin and skeleton are now on display at the museum in Hobart.

Initially, Tasmanian tigers were thought to roam in Australia, but their populations have dwindled due to the influences of humans and dingoes.

Eventually, thylacine was only found on the island of Tasmania, where it was hunted to extinction in the 1930s.

– This text was published at https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/geral-63860287.