family
Family (from ) is a Social group, group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or Affinity (law), affinity (by marriage or other relationship). It forms the basis for social order. Ideally, families offer predictabili ...
of carnivorous
marsupial
Marsupials are a diverse group of mammals belonging to the infraclass Marsupialia. They are natively found in Australasia, Wallacea, and the Americas. One of marsupials' unique features is their reproductive strategy: the young are born in a r ...
s from the order
Dasyuromorphia
Dasyuromorphia (, meaning "hairy tail" in Greek) is an order comprising most of the Australian carnivorous marsupials, including quolls, dunnarts, the numbat, the Tasmanian devil, and the extinct thylacine. In Australia, the exceptions include ...
. The only species to survive into modern times was the
thylacine
The thylacine (; binomial name ''Thylacinus cynocephalus''), also commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger or Tasmanian wolf, was a carnivorous marsupial that was native to the Mainland Australia, Australian mainland and the islands of Tasmani ...
(''Thylacinus cynocephalus''), which became
extinct
Extinction is the termination of an organism by the death of its Endling, last member. A taxon may become Functional extinction, functionally extinct before the death of its last member if it loses the capacity to Reproduction, reproduce and ...
in 1936.
The consensus of authors prior to 1982 was that the thylacinid family were related to the
Borhyaenidae
Borhyaenidae is an extinct metatherian family of low-slung, heavily built predatory mammals in the order Sparassodonta. Borhyaenids are not true marsupials, but members of a sister taxon, Sparassodonta. Like most metatherians, borhyaenids and oth ...
, a group of South American predators, also extinct, that exhibited many similar characteristics of dentition. A review published in 1982 compared the skeletal structure of these groups, concluding the tarsal bones show greater affinity with the dasyurmorphs, strongly supporting the later theory that any dental similarities emerged independently via
convergent evolution
Convergent evolution is the independent evolution of similar features in species of different periods or epochs in time. Convergent evolution creates analogous structures that have similar form or function but were not present in the last comm ...
. Thylacinidae is currently considered to be the most basal and earliest diverging member of Dasyuromorpha, estimated to have split from other dasyuromorphs around 42-36 million years ago.
The earliest thylacinid, '' Badjcinus'' from the
Late Oligocene
The Chattian is, in the geologic timescale
The geologic time scale or geological time scale (GTS) is a representation of time based on the rock record of Earth. It is a system of chronological dating that uses chronostratigraphy (the pro ...
around 28 million years ago, is estimated to have been around in weight, comparable to a living
tiger quoll
The tiger quoll (''Dasyurus maculatus''), also known as the spotted-tailed quoll, spotted quoll, spotted-tailed dasyure, or tiger cat, is a carnivorous marsupial of the quoll genus ''quoll, Dasyurus'' native to Australia. With males and female ...
. Early thylacinids were unspecialised faunivores. The family exhibited its greatest diversity during the
Miocene
The Miocene ( ) is the first epoch (geology), geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about (Ma). The Miocene was named by Scottish geologist Charles Lyell; the name comes from the Greek words (', "less") and (', "new") and mea ...
epoch, when there were several separate lineages of contemporaneous thylacinids, most of which were considerably smaller than the living thylacine. The genus ''
Thylacinus
''Thylacinus'' is a genus of extinct carnivorous marsupials in the family Thylacinidae. The only recent member was the thylacine
The thylacine (; binomial name ''Thylacinus cynocephalus''), also commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger or ...
'' emerged during the Early Miocene around 16 million years ago, and after the beginning of the
Pliocene
The Pliocene ( ; also Pleiocene) is the epoch (geology), epoch in the geologic time scale that extends from 5.33 to 2.58hypercarnivory.