Probably extinct

Usage examples of thylacine.

Training a Thylacine, usually unbelievably torpid, to do anything except eat or sleep on command was almost front-page news.

Billygonequeer went queer, he would stand all night and look upwards at the stars and howl exactly like the Tasmanian tiger, the thylacine, a creature dog-like in appearance and extremely shy of humans.

She told him how the thylacines-the Tasmanian tigers-had been killed by farmers, scared for their sheep, how the politicians in the 1930s noticed that the thylacines should be protected only after the last of them was dead.

Undoubtedly there were once thylacines on mainland Australia and, indeed, stories of their survival were finally corroborated in 1966 when David Lowry found the skin of a thylacine in a cave on the Mundrabilia cattle station in Western Australia.

In Australia the thylacine, or marsupial 'wolf (often called the Tasmanian wolf because it survived in Tasmania for a little longer than in mainland Australia), was tragically driven extinct within living memory, slaughtered in enormous numbers as a 'pest' and for 'sport' by humans (there is a slight hope that it may still survive in remote parts of Tasmania, areas which themselves are now threatened with destruction in the interests of providing 'employment' for humans).

She told him how the thylacines-the Tasmanian tigers-had been killed by farmers, scared for their sheep, how the politicians in the 1930s noticed that the thylacines should be protected only after the last of them was dead.

It was lying among the bones of other animals, including other thylacines, bats, snakes, rabbits, kangaroos, wombats and a Tasmanian devil.

In 1960, by the Manuka River (near the spot where a sighting had been reported), he himself heard the strange yapping hunting noise that the thylacines made.

Similar sightings have been reported from Queensland's Sunshine Coast since 1993: if these sightings are genuine, they are probably of thylacines whose recent ancestors escaped from zoos.

Passing through the grand hall with its imposing pendent banners of purple and crimson, its mounted heads of sabertooths and dragons, arctic bears and tropical thylacines, he turned left just before the imposing entryway and made his way to the smaller door that was nearer the stables.

Earth's biosphere has been in the intensive care ward for decades, weird rashes of hot-burning replicators erupting across it before the World Health Organization can fix them – gray goo, thylacines, dragons.