Tasmanian tiger joey 3D scans may unlock evolutionary mystery

CT scans of thylacine specimens are being used to investigate why they resembled dogs despite last sharing an ancestor 160m years ago

Joeys of thylacines, or Tasmanian tigers, look much like the young of every other marsupial: bald, pink, and with pronounced forelimbs and jaws for crawling into their mother's pouch and latching on to a teat.

So it's perhaps not surprising that, in the 200-year history of collecting and cataloguing various thylacine specimens for museum exhibits, there has been a bit of a mix-up.