I heard that the plan now is to release infection free devils onto some of the islands. One of the faculty in zoology here has done conservation work on the Tasmanian Devil and has essentially given up on being able to preserve the population on the main island
I just hope they don't screw up the local ecology by doing it. They need to check for evidence of previous devil populations in proposed relocation sites. There are plenty of examples of Aussie natives running amock outside their range within this country.there was a plan to send many of the captive thylacines to one of the islands around Tasmania but nothing ever came of it, so if they could do this with the devil that would be great. lets hope something is done and soon.
Coming to DNA thread. Some years ago there was an article about so-called "environmental genomics".
It turns, that if one simply takes a sample of soil and applies sensitive DNA extracting techniques, one can recover DNA signatures of most plants and animals living in the area. Scientists used it to estimate when very last mammoths and horses roamed prehistoric North America. I must say I didn't follow it further, and don't know if this technique caught up.
But this may be ideal for searching scarce Australian fauna. Just take samples from lairs, burrows, waterholes and similar places which are probably visited by marsupials, Night Parrots etc. And maybe you discover DNA, to search them further. Alternatively, no DNA would be a sad confirmation of absence.
Hmmmmmmmmmm Sounds interesting. Any idea of where the article / paper was published?
Chris
I meant to post that I was in Dublin in September and read in the local Lonely Planet guide that the exhibits in Dublin's Natural History Museum include a taxidermy of a thylacine. I made a point of going for a look, as I had never seen a stuffed thylacine, a sad sight. There was also a skeleton and three skulls. Dublin wasn't even the centre of the Empire, although I read somewhere that a lot of the exhibits were from someone's private collection.
Allen
I meant to post that I was in Dublin in September and read in the local Lonely Planet guide that the exhibits in Dublin's Natural History Museum include a taxidermy of a thylacine. I made a point of going for a look, as I had never seen a stuffed thylacine, a sad sight. There was also a skeleton and three skulls. Dublin wasn't even the centre of the Empire, although I read somewhere that a lot of the exhibits were from someone's private collection.
Allen
I remember being impressed and saddened as a child seeing a stuffed thylacine in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. Also, the Natural History museum in London used to have one. I assume both are still on show as nobody is going to throw out a presumably extinct animal.