Thylacine and how to categorise it

[Jim]

I read a thread on Scribbly Gum Forum recently that completely changed the way I thought about the thylacine. I had always thought of it as a dog or wolf of sorts - a canine, if you will. Or some kind of feline. But it turns out the Thylacine is actually more of an evolved bandicoot, numbat or quoll. Which makes perfect sense as it was a marsupial and evolved from common ancestors it shared with other marsupials, not canines or felines as I had mistakenly presumed before. The 'tiger' in the Thylacine vernacular is even more befuddling too. Although the "Tasmanian Numbat" doesn't have the same ring as "Tasmanian Tiger."

The thread in its entirety is here:

http://www2b.abc.net.au/science/scribbl ... 19632.shtm

[Mike Williams]

Hi Jim..thanks for the link..
There are some good sites on the net that deal with the thylacine.
http://www.naturalworlds.org/thylacine/

[forestguy]

Hey Jim - yeah, prob numbat or quoll more than bandicoot - Prehistoric Mammals of Australia and New Guinea has a reconstruction drawing of a a fox-sized thylacine - Nimbacinus Dicksoni - that's really numbat-looking.

And then Thylacaleo was from a different group again. They came out of the diprotodontian radiation, so more closely related to big wombat-looking things.

That said, you've gotta love convergent evolution.

thyl vs canid.jpg

PlacMars.gif