The plan to clone was based upon a very young individual preserved in alcohol. Unfortunately, longtime soaking in alcohol had damaged the genome and so ended the project. At least, that's what I have heard. Hix
Also even if they got DNA, there isnt a suitable "host" for them as they need a womb and pouch etc. Not as easy as just implanting any embryo into a dog!
Phylogenetically, the nearest living relative is the numbat, which is much too small to be a suitable "host".
it is a model, probably with chicken feathers. There are no genuine mounted dodo specimens left any more (all that remains of what was the very last mounted specimen is a foot and the head).
The foot and head are kept at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, which has a diverse collection. The building also contains the Pitt Rivers Museum, which is an interesting collection of artifacts from people around the world.
Hallo Zooboy28 The mummified foot and head are on display in a case near the entrance. There are casts of these in the Booth Museum of Natural History in Brighton. See http://www.oum.ox.ac.uk/learning/pdfs/dodo.pdf for more details.
Frustratingly only casts of the head and foot are now on display at the Oxford University Zoology Museum; the real specimens are now longer exhibited.
So the only known remains (excluding sub-fossils) are the Oxford head and foot (off-display), skull at University of Copenhagen Zoology Museum (off-display), and a skull and some leg bones at the Prague National Museum (off-display, museum reopening 2016). Are there really no feathers remaining?
Folks, thanks for the info about the dodo, and apologies for pulling the convo away from thylacines. (zooboy28, I too wish I had gone there instead of the Ashmolean, but I used to date this chick who was a student at Oxford, so I used to go there quite often. I had a neat trick where I could "read ancient Greek" to impress the girls - I don't think they realised that for the most part 'ancient' Greek letters are more or less the same as the modern Greek letters we learn in maths and physics. I can never forget the look of amazement of a chick when I was able to read the name "Dionysius" off a tablet. Now who here was able to impress a girl with their knowledge of thylacines and dodos? )
Thanks. Haven't seen this one before. Looks like it was a male with a scrotum evident. Any more photos of other individuals welcomed.
The Bell Pettigrew Zoology Museum at St Andrews University in Scotland has got one too, I didn't see any information about its origins:
Ah. I have finaly found my kind of thread!! It has probably already been talked about here but I want to know about what people think about the possibility of Thylacines still living in the dense forests and scrub lands of Southern Australia, Tasmania, and, to some extent, New Guinea. I've had a small conversation about this topic on the Cryptozoology page (where jbnbsn99 and Chlidonias took turns putting me down) but here I think we can go into it in more depth since it is, well, the Thylacine thread. First of, does anyone know if any other films were taken of Thylacines (captive or not) besides the Hobart Zoo, London Zoo, and Bronx Zoo? I had a collection of all captive videos but I can't seem to find it.
Forget about South Australia - the last bits of forest are probably on their way to Portland on the back of a semi as we speak. How did New Guinea get into this conversation. Western and North-western Tasmania are a remote [pun intended] possibility.
New Guinea is another place where Thylacine sightings are sometimes reported. The island was, once, part of the species' home range. Sadly, the forests are targeted for logging. That's why people say the government is hiding the continued existence of the animal because they live in such forests and protecting them would seriously injure Tasmania's government. Oh no they will follow me here and continue the bunbardment of facts disproving anything I say (I'm just joking).
Um... No one. Seriously, though, you seem like one of the most knowledgeable ZooChattians (Copyright 2012) here (not saying the rest of you aren't smart) so I'm looking forward to your non-believer attitude contributions on this thread