Probably I am thinking about the thylacine because I just recently wrote about the polar bear, whose other name is thalarctos, an impressive princely word. It sounds like a title, rank. Thylacine is not so regal-sounding.
But what a pleasant slippery word it is, lithe and foxy.
What an engaging stripey fellow the thylacine would seem to have been in person:
This site is a fine museum. There are films. Watch them and see how springy and elastic these animals were, with their long hind feet, heels on the ground. See their great dark eyes and alarmingly wide gapes.
This site dreams of cloning thylacines. Think of that.
This movie keeps catching up with me on late-night TV, when I'm actually in a place with a TV, and really it has a great deal more charm than IMDB would have you believe, at least, it does if you enjoy rolling the idea of the thylacine over and over in your mind in the hours after 2 am.
The Icelandic word for thylacine is pokaúlfur, "pocket-wolf," a good example of a coinage that makes sense, even if one has little use for it. Pokadýr are marsupials, "pocket-animals;" pokarottur are possums, "pocket-rats." It is a logical word, pokaúlfur, but not, to my ear, an evocative one. I do not know when it was coined, but I would like to, because suddenly I am curious whether it came into being before or after the last thylacine in captivity died, in 1936.
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Tamaninan tiger, isn´t it? Bráðhuggulegt dýr.
Yes! Reconstruct the Thylacine! Well ... a reconstructed Thylacine would probably have the same problems as the misbegotten Dolly the Sheep. We'd probably do better to clone a mouse first ... less to clean up after they explode (wait, that's teleportation). But if, by some alchemy, we could invite another stripey fellow to walk among us, by all means let Science Step Forward.
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