Video time capsule
I first ran across the thylacine (aka “Tasmanian tiger” or “Tasmanian wolf”) when I was preparing to teach a summer course on vertebrate zoology for a local Catholic college during grad school. While I’d had a decent amount of organismal biology and zoology as a college undergrad, I was a bit rusty from a few years of only studying organisms lacking nuclei, so I was looking for a quick refresher as well as some interesting topics for final paper assignments for the course. Just announced around that time was a “breakthrough” in the attempt to clone the thylacine, so I introduced that to the class in a discussion of the effects of geographic isolation, and had a nice discussion of both the molecular techniques and the ethics of a Jurassic Park-type scenario.