WHAT are the odds that Tasmanian tigers still exist? About 1 in 1.6 trillion, according to a mathematical model. Tasmanian tigers, or thylacines (Thylacinus cynocephalus), were marsupial carnivores native to Australia. The last known individual died in captivity in 1936, but sporadic claims of sightings have fuelled hopes that a few might still exist in a remote wilderness. Now Colin Carlson at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues have used data on confirmed and unconfirmed sightings from 1900 onwards to model the extinction of thylacines. Under the most optimistic scenario, they calculate that thylacines could have clung on only until the late 1950s (bioRxiV, DOI: 10.1101/123331).
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