ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
Did the thylacine violate the costs of carnivory? Body mass and sexual dimorphism of an iconic Australian marsupial.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Skull morphology of the extinct Tasmanian tiger suggests unique biting style.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Convergent carnivores or divergent dasyurids? Inferring predation and locomotor strategies of extant and extinct carnivorous marsupials from locomotor shape.BMC ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Degradation of fish food webs in the Anthropocene.Science advances · 2026Article
- New perspectives on body size and shape evolution in dinosaurs.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Illuminating the mystery of thylacine extinction: a role for relaxed selection and gene loss.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Cautionary tales on the use of proxies to estimate body size and form of extinct animals.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Over-eruption in marsupial carnivore teeth: compensation for a constraint.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Clade-specific forebrain cytoarchitectures of the extinct Tasmanian tiger.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- The multicausal twilight of South American native mammalian predators (Metatheria, Sparassodonta).Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Convex hull estimation of mammalian body segment parameters.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Functional ecological convergence between the thylacine and small prey-focused canids.BMC ecology and evolution · 2021Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
The relative body masses of predators and their prey strongly affect the predators' ecology. An accurate estimate of the mass of an extinct predator is therefore key to revealing its biology and the structure of the ecosystem it inhabited. Until its extinction, the thylacine was the largest extant carnivorous marsupial, but little data exist regarding its body mass, with an average of 29.5 kg the most commonly used estimate. According to the costs of carnivory model, this estimate predicts that thylacines would have focused on prey subequal to or larger than themselves; however, many studies of their functional morphology suggest a diet of smaller animals. Here, we present new body mass estimates for 93 adult thylacines, including two taxidermy specimens and four complete mounted skeletons, representing 40 known-sex specimens, using three-dimensional volumetric model-informed regressions. We demonstrate that prior estimates substantially overestimated average adult thylacine body mass. We show mixed-sex population mean (16.7 kg), mean male (19.7 kg), and mean female (13.7 kg) body masses well below prior estimates, and below the 21 kg costs of carnivory threshold. Our data show that the thylacine did not violate the costs of carnivory. The thylacine instead occupied the 14.5-21 kg predator/prey range characterized by small-prey predators capable of occasionally switching to relatively large-bodied prey if necessary.
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