Book Review: Thylacine by Branden Holmes and Gareth Linnard

If you know anything about me, you know that thylacines are my favorite animals. Yes, even surpassing wolves. Yet I haven't yet read too many books on this subject. Let's change that! This book is as of writing this review the latest and most up-to-date work regarding thylacines. 

In this non-fiction, the authors give us a look at thylacines. From what we know about their biology, to their history, depictions in indigenous Autralian culture, extinction, ecology, possible future and more.

This book definitely feels like a good source material if you want to read more about thylacines, especially since it's rather up-to-date. The only recent thing this book does not touch on is the possibility of there being another last thylacine after Benjamin, something which came to light around the time it was published (probably closely after its publication). But for what it is, this is a good resource on thylacines.

It does get a bit jargon-heavy at times and some of the more scientific aspects are a bit hard to understand and not always accessible to a broader audience, but aside from that I'd say it does a good job at telling us about thylacines. The chapter subsections are short but sweet, but they do convey what they're all about. 

I guess the only topic here I was kind of missing that wasn't touched on that much was the physical appearance of thylacines. Stuff like their sexual dimorphism, their exact sizes, proportions, their colors and markings. Sure, we have taxidermy and photos, but those don't portray the complete picture due to a lack of color, ageing of the specimens, often inaccurate taxidermy, the photos being of emaciated animals, etc. I guess the book really wanted to get into the nitty-gritty, but that doesn't mean that surface level topics such as what thylacines really looked like can't be touched on. There's still people in modern times who think thylacines had stripes on their tails or are canines, so it wouldn't have hurt to briefly touch upon what they looked like for real without just relying on grainy old photos or inaccurate faded taxidermy.

Overall this was a great book on the subject, though. I had a good time reading it and I definitely plan on reading more about thylacines in the future.

Rating: 5/5