Carnivorous Nights (7 page)

B
efore we met Don Colgan, we had been pondering the nature of life. Now we were wondering, what exactly was death? Such thoughts were driven sharply to the surface as Don led us through the museum's osteology exhibit. In it were scores of articulated skeletons, their bones blanched white. The sinuous vertebrae of a python were poised to strike, a furless fur seal hung from the ceiling suspended by wires, and a swan posed with its featherless wings outstretched. Beneath
a sampler that read “Home Sweet Home,” a human skeleton sat in a rocking chair powered by an invisible motor.

Next to the scrawny remains of a rat darting into a mouse hole, a hidden door led to the museum's basement collections. We walked down a steep staircase and into a hallway, passing a metal cart crammed with jars containing pickled bats and taxidermies of an echidna and mountain brushtail possum. The whole area smelled funereal, a combination of mothballs, alcohol, and formaldehyde used to preserve the old specimens. In front of a stiff mounted wombat, Don passed us off to Sandy Ingleby, the Australian Museum's curator of mammals. She was the custodian of the dead objects that contained the tiger's life code.

“Cute wombat,” Alexis said, pointing at the taxidermy.

Sandy laughed and flicked her flaming red hair. We noticed she lacked the semi-embalmed look of other specimen curators we had met. As she took us past the rows of mint green metal cabinets that held her lifeless charges, we caught a few of the labels: kangaroos, sugar gliders, quolls. All together, Sandy said, there were 41,300 specimens in the Australian Museum's mammal collection. Next to a tall, padlocked cabinet set slightly apart from the rest, we saw a photograph of a Tasmanian tiger with three half-grown pups backed into the corner of a wooden enclosure. With their wide eyes, they looked both wary and vulnerable. The photograph was taken in 1924.

“I call this my exhibit of extinct mammal specimens,” Sandy said, unlocking the cabinet. Inside, sliding trays were jammed with pelts, skulls, taxidermy, and boxes and jars containing body parts—each neatly numbered and labeled. Sandy reeled off some of the names of the dead: the Tasmanian tiger, the Toolache wallaby, the desert bandicoot, the broadfaced potoroo, the lesser bilby, the Darling Downs hopping mouse.

Though nearly two dozen animals were represented, half the space was devoted to the remains of the thylacine, totaling fifty-seven items. Sandy pulled out a tray and showed us the flattened, tanned pelt of a tiger. Its head was wolflike, the triangular ears crumpled with age, its eyeless sockets staring up at us. To say these objects were rare was an understatement. “They're not making any more of these,” Sandy pointed out. “At least not that we know of.”

The fur of the tiger pelt was ginger-colored (a mixture of brown, wheat, and gold). Broad chocolate brown stripes cut across the back, tapering
to a point on the lower flanks. Each stripe was different, like a ragged brushstroke.

“Can we touch it?”

“Go ahead.”

We ran our fingers lightly down the stripes. The fur felt rough, slightly bristly. We wondered if it had felt softer in life.

Sandy lifted up a female specimen and pointed out the pouch on its pale belly. It was a scooplike indentation just beneath the tail. “The thylacine pouch is round and rearward-facing, because it's an animal on all fours,” she said. Unlike a kangaroo, whose pouch opens forward and up, the thylacine pouch faced backward, so that mother tigers could run through the bush without injuring their pups. Inside the pouch, Sandy showed us that one of the dead thylacine's four teats was enlarged. The animal had been suckling a pup when it was killed.

Wearing white cotton gloves, Sandy assembled a still life of tiger remains on a long table, laying out two skulls, an articulated skeleton, a tiger brain in a jar of yellow-green liquid, and a skin.

For some people, being around preserved body parts, bones, and pickled organs might be uncomfortable. Not Alexis. He was like Norman Bates at a taxidermy blowout sale, rearranging the body bits and pieces, posing them for photographs. He fingered the heavy, elongated skulls, opening and closing the jaws to re-create the tiger's famous 120-degree gape. Their inch-long, inward-curving fangs were backed up by rows of knife-sharp teeth.

Sandy didn't seem to think there was anything strange about Alexis's fascination. She pulled out a taxidermy of a tiger—a skin mounted on a frame, with glass eyes inserted into the head. It wasn't very good. The tiger looked like it had died of a hangover—it was bug-eyed, cringing, and posed unnaturally in mid-crouch. A patch of hair below the neck had come off. We could never have fallen in love with this sad creature.

“What a hack job,” said Alexis.

Sandy agreed. “The mounting is of pretty low quality. It's fairly Eurocentric, very placental mammal rather than marsupial.”

“Looks like it's part mongoose,” Alexis added.

When Alexis had finished probing and critiquing the tiger remains, Sandy led us back to the extinction cabinet. None of the other animals inside
were as well-known as the thylacine, but each had its own long history and expiration date.

• The Eastern hare wallaby was a small kangaroo with a face like a rabbit and reputedly could jump over a horse—last confirmed sighting 1890.
  

• The Toolache was a plump, four-foot-tall wallaby with a black stripe on its muzzle—last seen 1937.
  

• The crescent nailtail wallaby was a golden brown hopper with enormous ears—last seen early 1960s.
  

• The broad-faced potoroo was a tiny hunchbacked kangaroo that dined primarily on truffles—last seen 1875.
  

• The lesser bilby was a needle-nosed burrower, with rabbit ears and a bottlebrush tail—last confirmed sighting 1931.
  

• The pig-footed bandicoot was a small, plump creature with a narrow snout, long skinny legs, and delicate hooflike feet—last confirmed sighting 1907.
  

Most of these extinct animals had never been photographed. Their likenesses survived only in artists' watercolors. This cabinet contained all that was left of them—and sometimes all that remained was a skull. If the cloning of extinct species ever became a reality, there would be plenty to rectify.

Ever since Europeans arrived in Australia, mammals have been disappearing at an astonishing rate. “Australia has the unfortunate distinction of being the continent in which the most mammal species have become extinct over the last two hundred years,” said Sandy. Nearly half of all the modern-day mammal extinctions worldwide have been from Australia— totaling nineteen species.

What caused all these extinctions? Sandy said certain factors came into play repeatedly in Australia. For starters, Europeans didn't arrive on the continent alone. They brought pets and other hangers-on with them and introduced them into the wild. The fox, rabbit, and cat arrived with British settlers in the nineteenth century, and all have made trouble for native creatures—eating them, taking over their habitats, and outcompeting
them for food. The settlers also disastrously altered the habitats of native animals, chopping down forests, planting nonnative crops, using up precious water resources, and suppressing fires that aboriginal people set to maintain grassy areas and increase game.

The thylacine's story was a little bit different. By the time Europeans arrived in Australia, thylacines survived only in Tasmania. In this last oasis, there was only one reason the tiger began to vanish. Sandy pointed to a ragged hole in the top of a taxidermy specimen's head. “I suspect that's a bullet hole,” she said. “They probably caught the animal in a trap and then shot it at close range.”

Most of Australia's mammal extinctions had resulted from “collateral damage.” They had not been intentional, but the result of poor land use and a thoughtless grab for resources. But thylacines were purposely exterminated. From a twenty-first-century perspective, it was hard to believe people had been so foolish, so wasteful, so disregarding of the thylacine's biological uniqueness, its beauty. It was also hard to accept that such an ancient species could be snuffed out so quickly. Wasn't it possible thylacines had resources the hunters knew nothing about: places to hide, strategies of cunning and avoidance? It was these niggling doubts that kept the tiger's status unresolved. So many people believed—or hoped— it would still be found one day that it was trapped in a state of limbo. We conjured up an image of the thylacine ferrying forever between life and death in the River Styx, but never quite reaching either shore.

We asked Sandy why she thought the extinction of the thylacine was so hard to accept.

“It's such a tragic story,” she said. “And it's so recent, isn't it?”

Was there any chance that a few Tasmanian tigers had eluded the traps and guns—that the moment of extinction had not yet arrived? Sandy said that a few Australian animals had, in fact, made it back across the River Styx. After disappearing in 1909, Leadbeater's possum was rediscovered in 1961. It lived in communal nests with up to eight possums and remained extremely rare, living in a small area of old-growth forest in Eastern Victoria. The Central rock rat, a desert species with a fat carroty tail that weighed only a few ounces, had been missing for twenty-five years when it was rediscovered in 1996. A few isolated populations clung to survival on a forty-eight-mile strip of land in Australia's Northern Territory. In 1989, the mahogany glider, a big brown-eyed possum with a
black stripe that runs from the tip of its nose to the end of its tail and which sails through the air on a parachute-like gliding membrane, was rediscovered after an absence of more than a hundred years. It was immediately declared an endangered species.

Could this happen with the thylacine, too? Would it be found inhabiting an isolated pocket in Tasmania's hard-to-reach backcountry? Sandy didn't think so. For every rediscovered animal in the cabinet—for every one that had received a pardon—there were five that had vanished, most likely irrevocably. Plus, she said, the few Australian animals that had been rediscovered were all on the small side. “Something as large as the tiger would be hard to miss,” she said.

For big animals like the Tasmanian tiger, the River Styx is wider, deeper, choppier—easier to get lost in. As far as the Australian Museum was concerned, cloning was the only hope for the tiger. And if Don and Karen were successful, future searches for the thylacine would be rendered a moot point.

Sandy said the specimen that had inspired the cloning project—the rare intact pouch pup—was kept in an area even more secure than the extinction cabinet. She led us back down the hallway and stopped in front of a steel metal door. Behind it was a room-sized safe. Two people were required to open it: One museum official had the safe's combination and another had the key. “I think it was originally built to protect the gem collection,” said Sandy.

For insurance purposes, the pickled pouch pup was valued at $1.5 million. And the staff couldn't be too careful with an object as rare as this one. In fact, there had been a rash of thefts at the museum in previous years. They had been inside jobs, too, with hundreds of specimens going missing, including an entire stuffed gorilla.

Given the security procedures involved in opening the safe, we were surprised when they finally opened the door. We had expected a high-tech facility with a subzero refrigerator and elaborate temperature controls. It looked more like a large broom closet. And the paint was peeling.

Alexis frowned. “Where do they keep the pouch pup?”

“It's in a bucket.”

After a moment of rummaging, Sandy pulled out a white janitor's pail and put it on top of an antique safe that looked like it had come off the
set of a Wild West movie. The bucket was heavily padded with foam rubber.

“This is the type of specimen jar they used during the 1800s and early 1900s,” she said, lifting out an eighteen-inch-high glass container filled with fluid. When we saw what was inside, we forgot about the peeling paint.

Immersed in liquid and curled up as if resting in its mother's pouch was the body of a Tasmanian tiger pup. The fur was palest gold, with brown whispers of stripes across the back and flanks. Its eyes were closed as if sleeping, and its right paw was tucked under its chin. We could see tiny sharp claws emerging from the paws and delicate whiskers floating in front of the muzzle. The tail was curved around the feet, and tiny, triangular ears lay against its blocky, outsized head. Spreading across the length of its short snout was a familiar grin. A white card taped to the jar read: “UJuvenile. Coll. Masters, 1866 from Tasmania.” It had been floating in alcohol for nearly 140 years.

If the pouch pup's digs weren't as posh as they might be, Sandy said we should have seen how it was stored before. For decades, the pouch pup was kept in the museum's “spirit house,” hidden among jars of kangaroo kidneys, monkeys, fetuses, and the brains of whales, all preserved in ethanol. “It wasn't even locked up. The spirit house was actually open from the street at one stage, so you could just walk right in there.” When Sandy took over the mammal collection in 1996, she helped move the marinated tiger pup inside the museum, down to the basement, and under lock and key.

We looked at the white card attached to the jar again. “What does ‘Coll. Masters’ mean?”

“George Masters was employed as the museum's collector. He went to Tasmania in the 1800s and captured wildlife and sent it back to the museum.” She said there were no details about how Masters acquired the pup. Almost certainly it had been captured and killed along with its mother.

We turned the jar halfway around and saw that the pup's belly had been slit open. “What's that?”

“Masters probably did that in the field when he collected it. If you put a whole animal like that into spirit, the spirit will only penetrate the outer surface and the internal organs will rot. So he slit it open to let the preservative go in.”

When this thylacine was first born it was less than an inch long— undeveloped, weak, defenseless. At that tiny size, it had to crawl across its mother's belly, clinging to her fur, and find its way into her backwardfacing pouch. There, the pup would have lived attached to a teat, until it was old enough to be left alone in a den while the mother went hunting. The pouch pup preserved in the bottle was probably at that stage, still reliant on its mother, but big enough to leave the pouch.