Humans alone are to blame for the extinction of the Tansmanian tiger, according to a new study. Yahoo News reported that Tasmanian tigers, or thylacines, went extinct in 1936. They looked like striped coyotes and lived mostly on Tasmania before Europeans came to the area and settled there in the 1800s.
Researcher Thomas Prowse of the University of Adelaide said in a statement, "Many people, however, believe that bounty hunting alone could not have driven the thylacine extinct and therefore claim that an unknown disease epidemic must have been responsible."
Prowse and a group of researchers created a mathematical model which evaluates the impacts of the settlement of Europeans to Tasmania and if it could have in fact killed the animal to extinction.
"Starting at the end of the 19th century, the Tasmanian government paid bounties for thylacine carcasses, as the animals were believed to prey on farmers' sheep and poultry. (A recent study, however, showed that the carnivores' jaws were so weak they likely couldn't have taken down anything larger than a possum.,)" reported Yahoo News.
Humans hunted the animal to extinction.
"The new model simulated the directs effects of bounty hunting and habitat loss and, importantly, also considered the indirect effects of a reduction in the thylacine's prey (kangaroos and wallabies) due to human harvesting and competition from millions of introduced sheep," Prowse said to Yahoo News.
The finding was published in the Journal of Animal Ecology this week and contradicts the belief of many that disease played a roll in its extinction.
"The thylacine's extinction has been debated many times and often researchers have concluded that some unknown cause, such as a disease epidemic, must have contributed to its extinction," lead researcher Dr Thomas Prowse told Australian Geographic. "We have weakened this argument by showing how the thylacine extinction can be explained by the well-documented impacts of Europeans."
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