Scientists look at droppings for extinct tiger

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Scientists in Australia plan to examine 50-year-old animal droppings to try to answer one of the nation's great mysteries -- is the Tasmanian tiger truly extinct?

Zoologist Jeremy Austin, from Adelaide University's centre for ancient DNA, will lead the project to look at the animal droppings, known as scats, found in the 1950s and 1960s, to find out if they came from the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine.

While the last authenticated sighting of a Tasmanian tiger was in 1936, when the last captive thylacine died in a zoo in the island capital, Hobart, unsubstantiated claims of fresh sightings regularly surface.

"If we find thylacine DNA from the 1950s scats it will be significant," Austin said in a statement on Thursday. "It's a long shot that they were still around in the 1950s, but we can't rule it out at this stage."

The last Tasmanian tiger seen in the wild was in 1918. Hundreds of people claimed to have spotted the animal in the intervening years, but repeated searches failed to find any conclusive evidence.

Whether the tiger died out in the 1930s, or whether any survive in the remote Tasmanian wilderness, remains one of Australia's great scientific mysteries.

Austin plans to examine droppings found in Tasmania by a thylacine expert, who said the scats were more likely to have come from a Tasmanian tiger than from the more common Tasmanian devil or quoll.

The Tasmanian tiger was the world's largest marsupial carnivore. It looked like a large dog with stripes across its back, a stiff heavy tail and a large head.

A shy, quiet and secretive animal, it was common in Tasmania when the first European settlers arrived in 1803, but the arrival of sheep in Tasmania in 1824 quickly prompted authorities to put a bounty on thylacines.

By the time the bounty was lifted in 1909, settlers had hunted the animals to near extinction. They were listed as rare creatures the following year.