A reader writes:
Here's a wonderful song by the Mountain Goats. It's written from the perspective of soon-to-be extinct animals. The album, The Life of the World Yet to Come, consisted entirely of songs inspired by certain texts of Scripture (with each being titled thusly). It was probably a tough sell for a lot of self-identified "indie" types, but it's a gorgeous album.
Another reader is vigilant:
The thylacine was emphatically NOT "a blurring of cat and dog." Evolutionarily, it's light years from either cat or dog.
It was a marsupial, far more closely related to kangaroos, koalas, and opossums than to cats, dogs, or even the ancient common ancestor of cats and dogs. It's no closer to cats or dogs than kangaroo rats are to actual kangaroos – or squirrel monkeys are to actual squirrels (further, in fact, since squirrel monkeys and squirrels are both placental mammals).
Thylacine evolved many of the same anatomical features and behavior characteristics as cats and dogs, filling, as it did, the ecological niche of predatory quadruped in an ecosystem in which marsupials spread out and specialized to fill all the same ecological niches as true (placental) mammals filled in the rest of the world. But the similarities are due not to close kinship but to parallel evolutionary histories among two very different family trees.
Maybe you meant "apparent blurring of cat and dog" or "mixture of cat-like and dog-like behaviors." But your word choice does not make it at all clear that you grasp the distinction.
The Dish 