Normal text size Very large text size He died of the cold. His name was Benjamin, the thylacine, Ben, the last Tasmanian Tiger – only we didn’t know that when he was captured and put in a zoo in 1933. In grainy black-and-white footage, Benjamin paces his enclosure, yawning and baring his jaws. He lies down, he sniffs the concrete. At one point (off-screen) he even gives the cameraman a cheeky bite on the bum. He died three years later, locked out of his backroom shelter one freezing night, just weeks after his species was at last granted protected status in Tasmania following decades of hunting. Eventually, the world came to realise that Benjamin really was the last of Australia’s great striped marsupial. But, when he died, they saw only an animal too damaged to be preserved in a museum. His body was tossed in a dumpster.