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- CANBERRA - Australia's Tasmanian Tiger, a marsupial wolf believed to
be extinct, may be reborn in only a few years with geneticists cloning
it from perfectly preserved baby "tigers'' kept in museums.
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- Australian Museum director Mike Archer
said the discovery of a baby "tiger'' preserved in a jar in his Sydney
museum had encouraged him over the past year to investigate the possibility
of bringing the wolf back to life using its DNA.
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- His Jurassic Park-style plan was reinforced
Thursday when six other baby Tasmanian Tigers, also known as the thylacine,
were revealed in other museums, meaning a greater gene pool could be used
and boosting the animal's chances of future survival.
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- "I've found out that there's a total
of seven thylacines around the world, so this isn't the only one "
there's a population waiting to be kickstarted,'' Archer told Reuters.
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- "There's been several geneticists
who are now saying it's not a joke, it's not silly, it could be done.''
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- La Trobe University's senior lecturer
in genetics, Mike Westerman, said it was possible the thylacine could be
cloned in the "not-too-distant future'' if the funds were available.
Archer said he was prepared to hand the baby "tiger'' over to anyone
with a serious cloning proposal.
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- Sydney's pouch-young thylacine was plonked
into its jar in 1866 and was preserved in alcohol rather than formalin,
which would have destroyed its DNA.
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- There were thylacines stored in alcohol
in the British Museum in London and in American museums as well as several
in a museum in Australia's island state, Tasmania.
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- Archer said he had previously thought
it feasible that Tasmanian Tigers, which grew to about two meters (six
feet) long including a long rigid tail, and have tapering stripes on their
bodies, could be sold as pets within 50 years.
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- But some geneticists had suggested it
may happen in only a few years. "The important thing is it's not a
question of if, it's a question of when,'' he said.
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- Australia had a moral duty to revive
the Tasmanian Tiger, which looked similar to a wild dog, after early British
settlers in Tasmania mercilessly hunted it down to stop it killing flocks
of sheep, he said.
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- The last known Tasmanian Tiger was captured
in 1933 and died in a zoo in the Tasmanian capital of Hobart in 1936. There
have been numerous reported sightings of apparent thylacines since then
in both Tasmania and on the mainland, but no evidence has ever been found
to prove they still existed.
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- Thylacines once roamed the Australian
mainland and New Guinea but are thought to have lost out in competition
with the wild dogs introduced by man into both places thousands of years
ago and to have become extinct long before white settlement.
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