The tiger, has always been a well known beast of the jungle. It’s the largest living cat species and is ranked as one of the top five deadliest mammals because of their immense physical strength.

Until recently, when talk of a new scientific experiment began to trend, most didn’t know that there was once another tiger breed that walked the face of the earth, the Thylacine, which is commonly known as the Tasmanian Tiger.

This animal is known for having dark stripes across its back, like the tiger we all know, but is quite different as it is described by National Geographic, to look like a slim dog with a stiff, thin tail and was a marsupial, the type of Australian mammal that raises its young in a pouch.

According to Australian Geographic, the last known Tasmanian Tiger died on September 7th 1936 in a Hobart Zoo in Tasmania.

According to a National Geographic Editor, the Tasmanian Tiger was most likely nocturnal and hunted at night; they would ambush smaller marsupials, as their prey, and had a jump in a way that was similar to a kangaroo when launching onto their prey.

Researchers in Australia and the United States are embarking on a multi-million dollar project to bring the Tasmanian tiger back from extinction.

Jay Bennett, National Geographic Senior Science Editor, said the Tasmanian Tiger existed in Australia and Niugini for millions of years and then thousands of years ago likely a combination of changing climates and human hunting.

Bennet also said, scientists' plan to de-extinct the Tasmanian Tiger is similar to the movie Jurassic Park; they are going to take the closest living relative to the animal, the numbat, and try to sequence the tiger's genome using preserved biological material.

"So they have sequenced the genome but it has gaps in it and they can fill those gaps using the genome of the nombat."

He said it could take five to ten years at the earliest and scientists may run into complications that make it much longer than that and the species that they would bring into existence wouldn't be a hybrid of the Tasmanian Tiger.

Scientists are unclear on how they will prevent the animal from going extinct again and how they will adapt to the environment successfully.

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