Tasmanian Devils have been born in the wild of Australia's mainland for the first time in more than 3,000 years, a conservation group Aussie Ark told Reuters.
Australian nonprofit Aussie Ark had released 26 adults into the wild in late 2020, which have now produced the seven new newborns, which raised hopes that the endangered animals can sustain a new breeding population.
Aussie Ark told Reuters that the seven joeys were in good health and rangers will monitor their growth over the next few weeks.
The world's largest surviving marsupial carnivore, Tasmanian Devils were wiped out on the mainland after being hunted by dingoes, a type of wild dog, and have been confined to the island state of Tasmania ever since. The species is now classified as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
Numbers there too have dropped since the 1990s due to a facial tumour disease and there are believed to be fewer than 25,000 left in the wild. The devastating disease still has no cure.
"There is so much at stake here. We've done everything we can, but if the Devils don't breed, its all over," Tim Faulkner, president of Aussie Ark conservation group, told Reuters.
“We’ve been able to historically — albeit in its infancy — return the devil to the mainland, and today is another milestone entirely,” Tim Faulkner said in a video posted Tuesday on Instagram.
Devils, the size of a small dog and made famous by the fierce Looney Tunes cartoon character known as "Taz", were listed as endangered on the United Nation's Red List in 2008.