How a ‘putrid’ find in a museum cupboard could be the key to bringing the Tasmanian tiger back to life

A well-preserved thylacine head was a gruesome sight — but it also contained RNA molecules crucial to reconstructing the extinct animal’s genome

Texas-based biotech firm, Colossal has achieved multiple scientific breakthroughs in its mission to bring back the thylacine, a species vital to the Tasmanian ecosystem that went extinct in 1936

Breakthroughs sometimes turn up in unexpected places. The researchers working on the international push to bring back the thylacine say they found theirs in a bucket in the back of a cupboard at a Melbourne museum.

It contained an astonishingly well-preserved head of the extinct marsupial, also known as the Tasmanian tiger.