In Living Color

For many extinct animals, we have precious little left to remember them by.  Dinosaurs left us their bones, and a few other fossilized odds and ends, but we still know relatively little of them.  Moving on to far more contemporary species, we have a handful of stuffed mounts of dodos, quaggas, and other modern extinctions.  The Thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, is perhaps the most famous extinct animal that we have actual video footage of.   Not much of it - just a grainy loop of film of a pacing, nervous specimen at Tasmania's Hobart Zoo - the last of its kind, taken not long before it's death.

Not surprisingly, the film was in black in white.  "Was."  Recently, the footage of the last Thylacine was colorized, similar to what's been done with footage for World War I and other historic events.  It looks a little eerie (okay, a lot eerie), like a ghost made flesh.   Perhaps seeing the animal in color is a poignant reminder of how close this animal came to living in our own era, and how tragic it is that we lost it.  I really feel like, if it had held on a few more years, our conservation ethos would have been awakened enough that we might have been able to save it.

Periodic sightings of the creature continue to pop up in Tasmania from time to time, and there are plenty of folks who are unwilling to let the idea of the tiger go.  For now, though, this footage, some pictures, and a few stuffed animals are what remains of Australia's marsupial wolves.