Endlings

I’d never heard of the word Endlings before and neither had friends when I asked them about it. It wasn’t Endings as I first thought when I read the word but in a way it is. It was first proposed in a letter to the editors of Nature on April 4, 1996, in which the correspondents wrote:

‘There is a need for a word in taxonomy, and in medical genealogical, scientific, biological and other literature, that does not occur in the English or any other language. We need a word to designate the last person, animal or other species in his/her/its lineage.’

A few years later in 2001, the National Museum of Australia, in Sydney, used the word in an exhibit in reference to the thylacine (also called the Tasmanian tiger), and its common usage was established.

thylacines (Tasmanian tigers) by Henry Constantine Richter (1821–1902)

When I started to look up the uses of it there were the expected scientific ones but surprisingly there have been two books entitled 'Endlings' and one of them had been longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. It is a debut novel by Maria Reva and is set in Ukraine and follows three women and an endangered snail species on a journey across the country during the Russian invasion.

The other is an epic fantasy from Katherine Applegate about Byx, the youngest member of her dairne pack, a rare doglike species. Her pack is lured into a trap and wiped out. As Byx sets out on a quest to find a safe haven—and perhaps even another of her kind—she meets new allies, who each have their own motivations for joining her.

There is also a Canadian science fiction television series about four young children living on a farm, who discover an extraterrestrial alien on their property after its spaceship crashes, and become drawn into the adventures of helping the alien in its mission to save endangered species.

Let’s get back to reality and for an example of Endlings look at what happened to the thylacine mentioned above. 

According to the National Museum of Australia the name thylacine roughly translates (from the Greek via Latin) as ‘dog-headed pouched one’. It was once the world’s largest marsupial carnivore. It was commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger, due to the distinctive stripes on its back. Despite its fierce reputation, the thylacine was semi-nocturnal and was described as quite shy, usually avoiding contact with humans. The fossilised remains of thylacines have been found in Papua New Guinea, throughout the Australian mainland and Tasmania.

one of the last thylacines (Tasmanian tigers) in captivity

Factors including the introduction of the dingo led to the extinction of the thylacine in all areas except Tasmania about 2,000 years ago. The thylacine population in Tasmania at the time of European settlement is estimated at about 5,000. The establishment of European settlements in Tasmania in the early 1800s resulted in colonists clearing large areas of land and cultivating livestock such as sheep and cattle.

As early as 1830 bounty systems for the thylacine had been established, with farm owners pooling money to pay for skins. In 1888 the Tasmanian Government also introduced a bounty of £1 per full-grown animal and 10 shillings per juvenile animal destroyed. The program extended until 1909 and resulted in the awarding of more than 2,180 bounties.

The last known shooting of a wild thylacine took place in 1930, and by the mid part of that decade sightings in the wild were extremely rare. Authorities from scientific and zoological communities became concerned about the state of the decimated thylacine population and pushed for preservation measures to be undertaken. However, a shift in public opinion and the start of conservation action came too late. The species was granted protected status just 59 days before the death of the last known thylacine, which died in Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo, possibly from exposure and neglect, on 7 September 1936.

My friend Julie Maclean lives near Geelong in Australia and has travelled around Tasmania. Ginninderra Press published her pamphlet in 2022 entitled ‘Spirit. Visiting the ghosts of Lutruwita (Tasmania)’. 

Julie Maclean (photo by Tania Hershman)

This poem is taken from that publication.

Thylacine

I saw you, I did.
You crossed in front of me
at midnight on the Fish Creek Road.
You were dead skinny with a
bone of a tail.

I was driving
in my canary yellow Corolla
with my young lover in the dead of night.
A dead secret between us, Foxy Boy.
Remember me?

                                 Julie Maclean, 2022

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.