Scientists Tested 51 Tasmanian Tigers — And Their DNA Told a Completely Different Story

Scientists Tested 51 Tasmanian Tigers — And Their DNA Told a Completely Different Story' 📖 THE WILD TRUTH ALMANAC: https://www.gideonmarsh.com Textbooks said a grown thylacine weighed around 65 pounds, and nobody actually checked until 2020, when a team measured 93 specimens in museums across six countries and the number came back at about 37 pounds on average, with females closer to 30. That is a border collie. In this one I go through what the DNA of 51 of them says, including that its line and the wolf's split about 160 million years ago and the skull is built for quick strikes at rabbit sized prey, not sheep. The part that gets me is where the old 65 pound figure came from, 19th century newspaper stories, every hunter's catch growing in the telling, and a government paid bounties for 21 years on the strength of it. I will be honest about where I land on this, the animal was already finished before the first rifle, diversity falling from 70,000 years ago and a hard crash about 3,000 years ago, so the guns did not start the fire. And legal protection arrived 59 days before the last one died in that Hobart cage.