In 1999, Professor Michael Archer (then Director of the Australian Museum in Sydney) instigated a bold and ambitious plan to attempt to clone the thylacine.  The project's research team obtained tissue samples from the internal organs of a female thylacine pup that had been preserved in alcohol at the Australian Museum for well over a century.  Their goal was to extract viable DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) with a view to recreating the species through cloning.  A clone is any organism whose genetic information is identical to that of the parent organism from which it was created. 

    DNA, albeit highly fragmented, was extracted from the tissues of the pup.  In addition, DNA was also extracted from thylacine bone and tooth specimens from within the Australian Museum's collection.  Interestingly, the best quality DNA recovered by the research team was from the tooth specimen, and not the preserved pup.

    By the middle of 2002, after over two years of intensive research, the Australian Museum succeeded in replicating individual thylacine genes using the PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) process.

    It is not within the confines of this presentation to discuss the complexities of the cloning process itself, but it is worth highlighting some of the hurdles that any scientific team will have to overcome if cloning of the thylacine is ever to become a reality.

    If we make the assumption that at some point in the future, the entire thylacine genome can been determined from these degraded samples, then researchers would be faced with the next major challenge; the creation of artificial chromosomes. 

    If we take the cloning story one step further, and assume that artificial thylacine chromosomes could be created, then a surrogate egg donor would need to be found and an egg removed from that donor.  Either of the thylacine's nearest relatives, e.g., the Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) or Tiger quoll (Dasyurus maculatus) have been suggested as potential surrogates.