Dingoes were twice the size of female thylacines and could have caused their extinction on mainland Australia through direct attacks, a new Sydney study suggests.
A comparison of museum specimens has found that thylacines on mainland Australia were smaller than those that persisted into modern times in Tasmania, and significantly smaller than dingoes, which arrived with human seafarers between 3500 and 5000 years ago but did not spread to Tasmania. The last known Tasmanian thylacine died in 1936.
Measurements of the head size and thickness of limb bones of the semi-fossilised remains of thylacines and dingoes from caves in Western Australia have revealed that, on average, dingoes were larger than thylacines.
“In particular, dingoes were almost twice as large as female thylacines, which were not much bigger than a fox,” said ecologist Dr Mike Letnic, an ARC Future Fellow in the UNSW School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, who led the study with colleagues at the University of Sydney. The findings are published in the journal PLoS One.
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