How a ‘putrid’ find in a museum cupboard could be the key to bringing the Tasmanian tiger back to life

A well-preserved thylacine head was a gruesome sight – but it also contained RNA molecules crucial to reconstructing the extinct animal’s genome

Breakthroughs sometimes turn up in unexpected places. The researchers working on the international push to bring back the thylacine say they found theirs in a long-ignored bucket in the back of a cupboard at a Melbourne museum.

It contained an astonishingly well-preserved head of the extinct marsupial, also known as the Tasmanian tiger.