Waking the dead

By Lisa Clausen
June 22 2013 - 3:00am
Living for the past … Professor Mike Archer with a thylacine skull. Photo: James Brickwood
Living for the past … Professor Mike Archer with a thylacine skull. Photo: James Brickwood
Pieces of the puzzle … fragments of thylacine bones. Photo: James Brickwood
Pieces of the puzzle … fragments of thylacine bones. Photo: James Brickwood
Hopped off … a gastric-brooding frog, currently extinct. <i>Illustration by Peter Schouten.</i>
Hopped off … a gastric-brooding frog, currently extinct. <i>Illustration by Peter Schouten.</i>

Professor Mike Archer's small office at the University of New South Wales is stuffy - the windows and blinds are so old they no longer open - and chaotic, with bones, skulls and chunks of limestone everywhere, jostling for space with books and stacks of paper. The half-assembled skeleton of a huge cave bear rears up over the clutter. "It was too big for the room," Archer explains regretfully. It's very different from the light-filled eerie overlooking Sydney he enjoyed as the high-profile director of the Australian Museum in 2000, when he made headlines around the world with his ambitious plan to clone the extinct thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger. Although a little greyer now at 68, the palaeontologist remains as bold and indefatigable as ever. "One foot over the precipice - that's the fun area for me," he says cheerfully.

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