Cloning usually comes in for a lot of bad press, but if a team of scientists in Sydney have their way that may be about to change.
In what a first glance seems a far-fetched plot straight out of the Jurassic Park stable, a group of Australian scientists are trying bring the extinct Tasmanian Tiger back into existence by using cloning technology and tiny samples of DNA almost a century and a half old.
The DNA has been taken from a baby Tasmanian Tiger, Thylacinus cynocephalus or thylacine for short, which has been preserved in alcohol for the past 135 years.
Up until last month the preserved thylacine, encased in an oversized jar, was the star attraction at the Australian Museum's Extinction Trail exhibition running under the promotional slogan "See It While It's Still Extinct". Now the museum has enlisted the services of a small group of geneticists to try to bring the beast back to life. Far from being a mad plot hatched by a few nutty professors, the scheme has won considerable support from sections of Sydney's scientific community and has also secured public funding worth 20,000 Australian dollars from the New South Wales government.
The thylacine was about the size of the average domestic dog, had a head like a wolf, tiger stripes on its body and massive jaws not seen in other animals its size. It could open those unique jaws around 150 degrees, the widest of any carnivore, and could crush a sheep's skull with one snap. The last of the animals died at Hobart Zoo in 1936 thus ending 25 million years of evolution for the marsupial.
Scientists believe the animal was once widespread on the Australian mainland, Papua New Guinea, as well as in Tasmania. But after the dingo arrived on the Australian mainland about 2,500 years ago from Asia, the less-intelligent marsupial was pushed aside and became isolated on the island of Tasmania off Australia's south-east coast. It thrived there, living near the top of the food chain and feeding on kangaroos, other marsupials, rodents and birds.
Its numbers were significantly reduced after the Van Diemen's Land Company introduced a bounty on the animal in the 1830s. European sheep farmers began shooting it amid fears the wild animals were killing livestock.
The specimen on show at the Australian Museum was a young thylacine collected in 1866 and stored in a bottle of alcohol. At the time of death it was still spending lots of time in its mother's pouch and was probably just old enough to move about independently of its mother inside the den. The preserved thylacine does have fur, however, and traces of the species' tiger-like stripes.
The group of scientists attached to the Australian Museum now working on the complicated cloning project have already extracted DNA from the preserved thylacine. This DNA is not complete, however, and will need to be mapped or matched with the DNA of the Tasmanian Devil or the Numbat, a marsupial anteater. These two living animals are closest in genetic make-up to the extinct Tasmanian Tiger.
The plan is to take a viable, unfertilised egg from a Tasmanian Devil, remove the nucleus and then replace it with the DNA mix. The embryos could then potentially be grown within surrogate marsupial mothers.
The leader of the cloning project, Dr Don Colgan, is a geneticist with the Australian Museum team. He believes that the project will succeed in the short-term, perhaps within 20 years. He also argues that humans have a duty to intervene to recreate the extinct species given the role played by our species in wiping it from the face of the earth in the first place.
"I think it is accepted that we feel a sense of guilt about what happened to this animal and are determined not to allow it to happen again," he said.