Could Brussels’ century-old thylacine ever return to the wild?

A Brussels museum technician has brought an international extinction debate into Belgian public view by choosing the Institute of Natural Sciences’ thylacine as his favourite specimen. In a BRUZZ profile published on 14 August, Jeroen said he hoped the animal could one day be returned to nature. The Institute confirms that the remarkably rare specimen has belonged to its collection since 1871, making Brussels a custodian of physical evidence from a species that disappeared within living historical memory.

For visitors, including families, scientists and EU staff based in Belgium, the display makes an otherwise distant Australian loss tangible. The thylacine — a carnivorous marsupial also called the Tasmanian tiger or Tasmanian wolf — once lived across mainland Australia and New Guinea, although in modern times it survived only in Tasmania. The last known individual died in captivity in Hobart in 1936. Brussels’ animal therefore predates that extinction by at least 65 years.

The museum’s role is conservation rather than genetic revival. Its Institute of Natural Sciences says the mounted animal is so fragile that humidity and lighting must be carefully controlled; the display light comes on only when somebody approaches. Visitors can also see footage of the last captive thylacine and hear a recording associated with the species. Jeroen’s museum favourite turns the specimen from a cabinet object into a question about whether scientific collections can help shape nature’s future as well as preserve its past.

That question is now being pursued most directly in Australia. Professor Andrew Pask’s Thylacine Integrated Genomic Restoration Research laboratory at the University of Melbourne is improving the thylacine genome, developing marsupial stem-cell methods and studying assisted reproduction. The laboratory argues that techniques developed for a thylacine-like animal could also help living marsupials through biobanking, breeding programmes and targeted genetic research. Its language is deliberately forward-looking: de-extinction research, in this account, doubles as a technology programme for species still capable of being saved.

The caution comes from conservation institutions themselves. The International Union for Conservation of Nature says “de-extinction” is a misleading term because present techniques cannot recreate an extinct species in its complete genetic, physiological, behavioural and ecological form. It prefers “proxy”: a substitute designed to perform some of the vanished animal’s functions. Its guidance calls for ecological justification, suitable habitat, welfare safeguards, consultation with affected communities and evidence that the project will not divert resources from living species.

Australia’s National Museum presents an equally restrained assessment. It says producing a healthy thylacine from surviving DNA remains extremely expensive and complex. The historical record also supplies a warning. Tasmania introduced bounties after the animal was blamed for livestock losses, and protection arrived only shortly before the last known captive animal died. A technological answer cannot erase the political choices and human hostility that helped cause the extinction.

For Belgium and the European Union, the connection is cultural and institutional rather than operational. The Brussels specimen gives the federal Institute of Natural Sciences a named place in the global memory of the species, but no evidence reviewed for this article shows that it participates in the Australian revival project. Nor have Belgian ministers or the European Commission announced a position on this particular proposal. The EU’s Nature Restoration Regulation concerns the recovery of existing European ecosystems, habitats and species; it is not a mandate to manufacture replicas of extinct Australian fauna.

The two approaches nevertheless illuminate each other. The European Commission says more than 80% of EU habitats are in poor condition and requires member states, including Belgium, to prepare restoration plans. That policy prioritises repairing habitat and helping surviving populations recover. Thylacine research asks a more speculative question: what should science attempt after prevention has failed?

Jeroen’s wish is therefore neither an announced reintroduction nor a result scientists can promise. It is a humane aspiration prompted by an animal preserved in Brussels for 155 years. What happens next will be decided mainly in Australian laboratories and, much later if the technology succeeds, through ecological, animal-welfare and community assessments in Tasmania. Until then, the museum’s quieter achievement remains certain: keeping one thylacine visible long enough for another generation to confront why it vanished.