Can these extinct South Aussie animals live again?

A scientist who says he has the technology to resurrect the Tassie tiger reckons he could also bring extinct SA animals back from the void.

The scientist who reckons he can resurrect the Tasmanian tiger says extinct South Australian species could be brought back to life too.

Using advanced genetic technology, stem cells and surrogates, it’s thought animals such as the extinct pig-footed bandicoot, desert rat-kangaroo and eastern hare-wallaby could be revived.

While the long-term goal is to bring back long-dead animals, in the near-term the technology could enable mass-reproduction of endangered species to boost their chances of survival.

Professor Andrew Pask is launching a project to bring the Tassie Tiger back to life. Professor Pask holds a skull of a Tasmanian tiger and a test tube containing DNA. Picture: David Caird

Professor Andrew Pask, who heads Melbourne University’s new Thylacine Integrated Genetic Restoration Research Lab, wants to “biobank marsupial diversity now” and develop new breeding techniques “to make sure we don’t end up sending other species extinct”.

He said the endangered South Australian beneficiaries could include the Kangaroo Island dunnart, which almost became extinct when most of its habitat was destroyed in the 2019-20 bushfires.

Then there’s hope of bringing back a host of other small marsupials such as types of bettongs, bilbies and bandicoots, some of which disappeared from the state in the years after European colonisation but still survive elsewhere.

Reaching further back into the past to restore long-extinct megafauna is far more technically challenging and presents a “much harder case, ethically”, but it would be “so cool”, Prof Pask said.

Thylacoleo – the marsupial lion – is high on his wishlist.

“There is DNA in those specimens,” he said, even though they are tens of thousands of years old. Scientists overseas recently extracted DNA from a woolly mammoth which was more than a million years old.

University of Adelaide researcher Dr Bastien Llamas from the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA with mammal specimens at the SA Museum. Picture: Matt Turner.

At Adelaide University’s Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, scientists have extracted DNA from long-dead species of moa of New Zealand, bison and dire wolves of North America, elephant birds in Madagascar, glyptodonts and ground sloths from South America, and bears and lions in Eurasia.

The centre’s Associate Professor Bastien Llamas helped Prof Pask reconstruct the thylacine’s genetic code and looks forward to seeing what comes next.

“If he manages with his team to improve or create methods that are very efficient, then suddenly you can start going through the list of all these animals that are on the verge of extinction in Australia,” he said.

“Eventually (we can) try to help conservation efforts by basically producing more (animals) and then expanding the populations that are struggling.”

At the SA Museum, visitors can see some of the mammals that went extinct after European occupation in the Biodiversity Gallery.

Flinders University evolutionary biology expert Professor Michael Lee, based at the museum, said that for the foreseeable future, bringing totally extinct animals back would only be possible for those where there are good, relatively recent museum specimens.

“Any talk about dinosaurs, plesiosaurs or even Pleistocene megafauna is just a pipedream,” he said. “There is also a widespread alternative view among many ecologists that de-extinction is a very expensive longshot.”