This chapter will deal further with phylogenetic analysis. We will introduce methods in addition to those of neighbour-joining and we will use a Perl script to examine taxonomy data. For these topics we will take a closer look at an extinct animal, the Tasmanian tiger.

Extinction

The Tasmanian tiger was not, in fact, a tiger; it was a dog-like marsupial animal. Thylacine is the more adequate scientific name. In the early twentieth century it existed only in Tasmania, and even there it was very scarce. A farmer named Wilf Batty lived in the Mawbanna district of northeastern Tasmania. On 13 May 1930 he spotted a thylacine attempting to break into his chicken coop. Batty had observed the thylacine around his house for weeks, and this day he took his rifle and shot the animal. As it happened, this was the last wild thylacine to be killed. Another specimen, most likely a female, was captured in 1933 and kept at the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania. She died on 7 September 1936, apparently as a result of neglect. The animal was kept outdoors and was not allowed access to her den, despite difficult temperatures. Ironically, the death took place only two months after the thylacine species was given full legal protection by the Tasmanian government. There are sightings of the thylacine reported after 1936, but none of these are well documented and we unfortunately need to regard the thylacine as being extinct.