Dingo ate out the Thylacine on the Australian! Mainland

The extinction of the Tasmanian tiger from the Australian mainland may have been driven by its inability to kill large prey, which placed it in direct competition with the dingo for food, new research shows.


Check out full story here:

www.unexplainedaustralia.com...

That's funny. I thought it was because of the huge campaign to shoot them.

Ranchers thought the tiger was killing their herds, when it was probably the dingos. They destroyed the entire species because of it.

I think the above only applies to Tazmania, not sure.

I thought this was a fascinating story, and a reminder of how complex an extinction event could be. I was chatting with my paleontologist friend the other day and mentioned this -- and speculated that climate change can cause predators to move (they're not as picky and specialized as herbivores) ... and help drive a species to extinction or the brink of it.

Farmers were certainly implcated in their extinction:
www.kidsnewsroom.org...

Originally posted by benign.psychosis
That's funny. I thought it was because of the huge campaign to shoot them.

Ranchers thought the tiger was killing their herds, when it was probably the dingos. They destroyed the entire species because of it.

I think the above only applies to Tazmania, not sure.

The article is referring to the extinction event thousands of years ago on the mainland, there are no dingoes in Tasmania so they continued to thrive there until settlement, there was even a bounty on their heads so people actively sought to kill them for money. Truly shocking, not nearly as shocking as the accounts of genocide committed against the Aboriginal people, the Tasmanian Aboriginals suffered a similar fate, they too are also extinct.