Overview
- Researchers from Flinders University, the University of Melbourne and the Australian Museum published a peer-reviewed Nature Communications paper on Monday using CT-based 3D morphometrics to compare thylacine skulls with 60 carnivorous mammals.
- The team found the thylacine had an oversized skull for its ~17 kg body, a long tall snout with a flared 'terminal rosette' near the canines, and an unusually large infraorbital foramen, a combination not seen in living meat-eating mammals.
- Functional analysis indicates the skull produced a fast, high-impact snapping bite suited to catching small-to-medium agile prey such as bandicoots rather than holding down large animals like sheep.
- The finding challenges the long-standing wolf‑like livestock predator label that helped justify colonial bounty hunting from 1830 to 1914 and prompts a rethink of the human role in the species’ rapid decline.
- By showing how 3D skull shape and bite mechanics can reconstruct behaviour for extinct animals, the study highlights both the thylacine’s evolutionary uniqueness and how scientific inference can change how we interpret past conservation failures.