Thylacine 2

Dresden

Is this photo taken in a museum in Dresden or at Dresden Zoo?

Dresden's Museum für Tierkunde.

The Thylacine was darker coloured than the mounted specimens nearly always indicate- due to their fading. I have seen skins which haven't been kept in the light- the fur was very much a wild rabbit-colour(agouti) and the stripes blackish. There were also distinct paler areas under the eyes and the ears.

Has this museum got a Quagga?

I don't think so-at least I didn't recall any. As far as Germany is concerned, only the natural history museums of Berlin, Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Mainz, Munich and Wiesbaden officially have one Quagga mount respectively.

You're right. I looked on the Quagga Project site and Dresden aren't listed with any material. I wouldn't mind seeing some decent colour photos of a few more museum specimens though..

I believe it may be very difficult to replicate the colour scheme of the Quagga and from all the photos, the animals the Project is producing seem more closely to resemble Burchell's Zebra.

Do you know if there are any color pictures of live thylacines? I've seen black and white photos of the last ones alive in zoos, but it would be very interesting to see their live coloration.

The only 'colour' photo I've seen are of a pair at the Washington/Smithsonian Zoo and that has been artificially coloured-up from the original b/w photo. Unfortunately I know of no genuine ones.

When I talked to Alison Reid, who was the daughter of the curator(?) of Hobart Zoo and remembered them from her childhood, she also described the base colour as 'like a rabbit's'- the unfaded specimens/skins I've seen were like that but with a greyish tint and the blackish stripes.