section_path: Distribution and habitat
section_name: Distribution and habitat
paragraph_text: Distribution and habitat
  
  The thylacine most likely preferred the dry eucalyptus forests, wetlands, and grasslands of mainland Australia. Indigenous Australian rock paintings indicate that the thylacine lived throughout mainland Australia and New Guinea. Proof of the animal's existence in mainland Australia came from a desiccated carcass that was discovered in a cave in the Nullarbor Plain in Western Australia in 1990; carbon dating revealed it to be around 3,300 years old. Recently examined fossilised footprints also suggest historical distribution of the species on Kangaroo Island. The northernmost record of the species is from the Kiowa rock shelter in Chimbu Province in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, dating to the Early Holocene, around 10,000–8,500 years Before Present. In 2017, White, Mitchell and Austin published a large-scale analysis of thylacine mitochondrial genomes, showing that they had split into eastern and western populations on the mainland prior to the Last Glacial Maximum and that Tasmanian thylacines had a low genetic diversity by the time of European arrival.
  
  In Tasmania, they preferred the woodlands of the midlands and coastal heath, which eventually became the primary focus of British settlers seeking grazing land for their livestock. The striped pattern may have provided camouflage in woodland conditions, but it may have also served for identification purposes. The species had a typical home range of between 40 and 80 km 2 (15 and 31 sq mi). It appears to have kept to its home range without being territorial; groups too large to be a family unit were sometimes observed together.