Thylacines, Toolache Wallabies, Bulldog Rats - Visiting The Austalian Museum's Extinction Cabinets

At the far end of one of the mammal rooms in the maze of offices and labs behind the Australian Museum in Sydney stand two anonymous grey metal cabinets. Although there is nothing to distinguish them from the storage units elsewhere in the room, they are freighted with particular significance. These cupboards, known within the museum as the “extinction cabinets”, contain specimens of 24 of the 39 mammal species that have been wiped out since Europeans invaded Australia. They hold an index of loss stretching back almost 240 years.

My guide to the cabinets is Dr Mark Eldridge, a geneticist and the museum’s manager of terrestrial vertebrates. Eldridge opens the first of the cabinets to reveal 11 wide, sliding shelves, each of which contains an assortment of skins, teeth, bones and taxidermized mounts. Some of the animals are immediately recognisable – the bottom shelves contain the striped hides of two thylacines, for instance. Others, like the stuffed form of a Koontin are less familiar.

But as Eldridge picks out each relic in turn, he relates the animals’ stories, his tone bouncing from dismay to regret and back again. One bundle of soft, blonde-brown fur is all that remains of a toolache wallaby, a species that once inhabited a small area in south-eastern South Australia. It was hunted for sport by early settlers, but is more likely to have been driven to extinction by the destruction of its habitat for farmland.

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This is especially important because many of the species held in the cabinets disappeared so quickly that almost nothing remains of them: in the case of the broad-faced potoroo – a small marsupial that lived in southern Western Australia that is believed to have been killed off when cats arrived in the region in the second half of the 19th century – only 10 skins remain, five of them in the Australian Museum’s care. “Sometimes it’s like looking at ghosts,” says Ingleby. “You look at them and think, ‘Oh yes, this is all we have left’.” But as time has gone on, the cabinets have taken on meanings that extend beyond the scientific and curatorial. “People often cry when they see them,” says Eldridge. “You just open them up and start talking and when you look around they’re bawling.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/13/australian-museum-extinction-cabinets-endangered-species