In 2005, I took a photo of the thylacine on display at the Smithsonian and posted it on Flickr.

Flickr photos sometimes accrete slow conversations about the image. This morning, someone writing as Katster54 left the following interesting story:

You know why the Smithsonian thylacine has a pretty face? Because it is one of the three living thylacines shipped to the United States from Tasmania in 1902. Photographs of them alive in the National Zoo in Washington D.C. are on the internet. They were a mother and three children. The mother, in fact, was pregnant and delivered in her crate enroute from Tasmania to the United States. She was in bad shape when she arrived in Washington D.C. in May of 1902. The baby she delivered enroute only lived a few months. She lived until 1905 and I think the last one of this group had passed on by 1909. If you look at hers and her children's photograph when she lived at the National Zoo, you will see that she and her children had beautiful faces.