Using advanced genetics, international scientists are working to bring the legendary marsupial back from extinction.
This week marked the 90th anniversary of the expiry of the last Tasmanian Tiger in Hobart on September 7, 1936.
The marsupial, an apex predator that once roamed the Australian mainland, was wiped out in its last stronghold by European hunters, habitat destruction and disease.
Drawing on thylacine remains in museums and universities, researchers have already pieced together a full genome in a step toward reviving the species.
Given the progress, lead geneticist for the project at Melbourne University Andrew Pask is very hopeful a live thylacine can walk the Earth again in 2036.
Four years ago, he teamed with Colossal Biosciences in the US and now a large team of scientists is focused on trying to bring the tiger back, with the technology well advanced and pushing boundaries.
Genetic engineering and editing were now possible at scale, and artificial intelligence assisted in that, said Professor Pask, who was the first to put a thylacine gene into a mouse and make it work.
When a full genome is sequenced, it's a matter of finding the closest living relative to the extinct species.
In the case of the thylacine, that's a tiny marsupial called the Fat-tailed Dunnart, which is about 99.8 per cent genetically identical to the tiger.
Gene-editing tools are then used to change every bit of code where the dunnart differs from the thylacine, with cloning employed using an egg from a donor dunnart.
"That's part of the technology we're working on at the moment; how we clone, how we take a cell and create a whole animal from it in marsupials," Prof Pask told AAP.
"You build up over time, get closer and closer to live DNA cells of the thylacine. We're in that process now of making all of those edits."
Researchers were also becoming proficient at artificial DNA synthesis, meaning future gene editing could be bypassed and a thylacine genome could be synthesised.
A dunnart would have no problem birthing a thylacine because the newborn tiger would only be about the size of a grain of rice, Prof Pask said.
"It could probably survive in Mum's pouch for about two weeks so it would get that early milk ... then you would remove it and just hand-rear it from then on."
Prof Pask said thylacines with slightly different DNA would be produced to ensure diversity and a healthy breeding population.
The rewilded tigers would not need to be taught to hunt and mate as that was hard-wired into them.
Genetic tools are also being developed to protect endangered Northern Quolls from dying after eating cane toads, and Tasmanian Devils from a fatal facial tumour disease.
Rather than tampering with Mother Nature, Prof Pask said scientifically reproducing a live thylacine was about righting human wrongs.
"We tampered with nature when we hunted the thylacine to extinction, and I think we have a moral obligation, now that we have the technology, to bring these animals back," he said.
"We're doing the good thing now of undoing some of the big mistakes that we know we made in the past."
