A substantial portion of the Tasmanian tiger genome was sequenced and published today.  Interesting beast.  It was a marsupial and therefore, much more closely related to the Kangaroo and the Oppossum than to any actual tiger.  It was a predator that was top of the food chain in Tasmania and it went extinct because of hunting about a century ago.

It is the animal that is frequently held up as an example of how different environments converge to having the same kind of structure.

The mammal world on the big island was separated from the rest of the animals a long time ago - more than 100 million years ago (or about 3,000 years ago, if you are Sarah Palin, but I digress).   This meant that the ecology of Australia and Tasmania evolved independently to the rest of the animal kingdom.  The bigdifference was that the animals you found there had pouches.  They were marsupials and carried their young for a time after birth.

What developed was pretty similar to what developed in the rest of the world.  You had a variety of different animals.  Some nocturnal, some diurnal.  You got Koalas, Wombats, Possums and Kangaroos who were herbivore and you got marsupial carnivores such as the Tasmanian devil, the Dunnart and the Tasmanian tiger.

It has always seemed to me to suggest that there is a certain inevitability about evolution.  There are certain niches and there is a food web.  Given enough evolutionary time, even a single population occupying an island will diversify so that eventually this web will be filled with all its components.

The Tassie tiger was finally run to extinction by hunting and the few photos of this species (about 2 or three) have become somewhat iconic in evolutionary biology.  So, today or sometime soon, I hope to sit down and find out a little about the genome of this species.The tope predator in Tasmania until we came along and ended it all.