Tasmanian tigers, also known as thylacines, had dangerously low genetic diversity decades before disease and human hunting drove them extinct, an analysis of the first complete mitochondrial genomes from the extinct marsupials reveals.
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An international group of scientists used powerful new technology to decode mitochondrial and some nuclear DNA from two thylacine museum specimens. The researchers report their findings online January 13 in Genome Research.
“It’s looking like the thylacines were sort of on their last legs,” says Webb Miller, a genomicist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park and lead author of the new study.