CT scans of thylacine specimens
are being used to investigate why they resembled dogs despite last sharing an
ancestor 160m years ago
Wed 21 Feb
2018 00.54 GMTLast modified on Wed 21 Feb 2018 01.28 GMT
Joeys of thylacines, or Tasmanian
tigers, look much like the young of every other marsupial: bald, pink, and with
pronounced forelimbs and jaws for crawling into their mother’s pouch and
latching on to a teat.
So it’s perhaps not surprising
that, in the 200-year history of collecting and cataloguing various thylacine
specimens for museum exhibits, there has been a bit of a mix-up.
The issue was discovered when
researchers from Melbourne University and Museums Victoria used the
international thylacine specimens database, a catalogue of everything from
pelts to bone fragments, to request access to every known preserved joey that
had not developed past the stage of leaving the pouch, which happens around 12
weeks of age.
There were 13 on the list,
including one in the Czech Republic. But two specimens, sent from the Tasmanian
Museum and Art Gallery, turned out to be either quolls or Tasmanian devils.
“The one that we scanned had a
different number of vertebrae to the Tasmanian tiger, and also had enlarged
epipubic bones, which are the centralised bones in the pelvic area that help
support the pouch,” Christy Hipsley from Museums Victoria said. “Those are very
reduced in the thylacine so we can see automatically that this is definitely
not a thylacine skeleton.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
You only need to enter your comment once! Comments will appear once they have been moderated. This is so as to stop the would-be comedian who has been spamming the comments here with inane and often offensive remarks. You know who you are!