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Conservation of Nature) and CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), some imminent extinctions are being arrested— although sadly these tend to be the high-profile cases such as the panda and Russia’s 40 known Siberian leopards.
    Extinction reversal, as a natural return from the dead, is invariably surprising. The coelacanth, a deep-sea fish, was believed to have been extinct for 75 million years until discovered alive and well near the Comores Islands off Africa’s east

    The thylacine, along with the dodo, is the most prominent victim of modern human-induced species extinction. But unlike the flightless bird of Mauritius, which became an easy food source for Dutch sailors, the thylacine was targeted as an economy-wrecking sheep killer. (T. Peters, South Australian Museum) coast. It is unchanged in form, a Palaeozoic miracle. Ironically, nearby Madagascar has been raped of its forest cover and has possibly the inhabited world’s worst extinction record. Yet in the 1980s the golden hapalemur was discovered there, a new species of lemurid. Numerous Australian marsupials and birds have been declared extinct only to be found again. The noisy scrub bird is a good example, last seen in 1899 before its rediscovery in 1961. Other returnees include the bridled nail-tailed wallaby and the sandhill dunnart and, for sheer longevity of absence, the mountain pygmy possum, believed extinct for 15 000 years.
    The Angolan giant sable antelope, thought to have been rendered extinct by 30 years of sustained, brutal civil war, has been rediscovered, although there have been only five positive sightings. Angola is much larger than Tasmania. They do, however, have in common great tracts of forest which people don’t enter. No doubt the antelope retreated there. It is this ability of a species to protect itself that gives so much hope to those who believe in the continued existence of the thylacine. But it doesn’t offer much comfort. Life on earth took hundreds of millions of years to evolve. The rapidity, ruthlessness and extent of human-induced extinctions, of which the thylacine is just one high-profile victim, is truly frightening.

5 A RUGGED
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    About half way between the Frankland and Arthur Rivers we were camped for the night, in a beautiful glade in a myrtle forest, when around the fire in the evening, my father told of the experience he and Bill Morley had as they walked into Mount Balfour to commence work at the mine, over the same track, and he told us that as they walked in they were stalked through the night by two Tasmanian tigers, and were afraid to stop for rest . . .
    R. R. M CARTHUR, L INDISFARNE
    O ver a period of some thousands of years a profound technological development set up conditions for civilisation to advance. This was the domestication of plants and animals, which first occurred in the Mesopotamian region. Where previously wild grains had been harvested where they grew naturally, between about 8000 BC and 3000 BC barley, oats, lentils, olives, onions, camels, cattle, sheep, pigs and horses all came under the control of man. The invention of irrigation and the plough and the warming global climate made cultivation possible. Far eastwards across the other side of the world, at the south-east tip of Australia, that same global warming had caused the Bassian Plain to be flooded, creating the strait that isolated Tasmania from the mainland.
    Thus, while the peoples of the Fertile Crescent were establishing the first villages and working out rudimentary concepts of commerce, maths and philosophy, small Aboriginal tribes became isolated on a group of islands at the bottom of the continent. People had already been in those parts for tens of thousands of years and their ancestors had experienced similar comings and goings on the low-lying flat plain, bounded by mountains to its east (their remnants now the islands of the