『The Thylacine's Last Days: Extinction Fifty Nine Days Too Late』のカバーアート

The Thylacine's Last Days: Extinction Fifty Nine Days Too Late

The Thylacine's Last Days: Extinction Fifty Nine Days Too Late

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On September 7th in the year 1936, the world quietly lost an entire species, though almost nobody realized the magnitude of what was happening at the time. In an enclosure at the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania, a thylacine, commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger, died after apparently being locked out of its sheltered sleeping quarters and exposed to a bitter cold night followed by blistering heat the next day. This animal, later given the name Benjamin by the public, though that name was actually applied retroactively and not during his lifetime, is believed to be the last known living member of his species. The thylacine was a remarkable and strange creature, a carnivorous marsupial that looked something like a wolf crossed with a large dog, but with a stiff kangaroo like tail and distinctive dark stripes running across its lower back, which earned it the nickname tiger despite having no relation to actual tigers whatsoever. Female thylacines carried their young in a pouch, just like kangaroos, which made this predator biologically closer to a koala than to any wolf. It once roamed across mainland Australia and New Guinea, but competition from dingoes and other pressures pushed it into extinction there thousands of years earlier, leaving Tasmania as its final stronghold. Unfortunately for the thylacine, European settlers in Tasmania viewed it as a threat to livestock, and bounty programs were established that paid hunters for every thylacine they killed. Combined with habitat destruction, disease, and the introduction of competing species, the population collapsed with startling speed. By the nineteen twenties, sightings had become rare, and the species existed in a precarious position that almost nobody at the time seemed to treat with urgency. The tragic irony is almost too painful to overstate. Just fifty nine days before that lonely thylacine died in his enclosure, the Tasmanian government had finally added the species to a list of protected animals. It was, in the cruelest possible sense, a case of too little and far too late. Conservation laws arrived only after the last known individual of the species was already living out its final weeks in captivity. For decades afterward, hope persisted that thylacines might still be out there somewhere, hiding in the dense forests and remote wilderness of Tasmania. Hundreds of alleged sightings have been reported over the years, and expeditions have been launched searching for proof, but no confirmed evidence of a living thylacine has ever been produced since that day in 1936. The species was officially declared extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in the year 1982, though many consider the true moment of extinction to be that quiet death in the Hobart Zoo. Today, September 7th is commemorated in Australia as National Threatened Species Day, a day set aside to reflect on the thylacine's fate and to raise awareness about other species currently at risk of following the same path into oblivion. Scientists have even used preserved thylacine specimens, including pups kept in ethanol and stuffed exhibits sitting in museums, to extract genetic material in ambitious and controversial attempts to explore what a de extinction effort might look like someday. Whether or not that dream ever becomes reality, the story of the thylacine remains one of science history's most sobering reminders of how quickly a species can vanish once human pressures align against it, and how conservation efforts must come well before a creature's numbers dwindle down to a single, solitary animal pacing in a zoo enclosure. Some great Deals https://amzn.to/49SJ3Qs For more check out http://www.quietplease.ai
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