closer to the ambushing of felids than to large pursuit canids. Its stomach was muscular, and could distend to allow the animal to eat large amounts of food at one time, probably an adaptation to compensate for long periods when hunting was unsuccessful and food scarce. In captivity, thylacines were fed a wide variety of foods, including dead rabbits and wallabies as well as beef, mutton, horse, and occasionally poultry. There is a report of a captive thylacine which refused to eat dead wallaby flesh or to kill and eat a live wallaby offered to it, but "ultimately it was persuaded to eat by having the smell of blood from a freshly killed wallaby put before its nose." In 2017, Berns and Ashwell published comparative cortical maps of thylacine and Tasmanian devil brains, showing that the thylacine had a larger, more modularised basal ganglion. The authors associated these differences with the thylacine's predatory lifestyle. The same year, 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 had low genetic diversity by the time of European arrival. Extinction Dying out on the Australian mainland Australia lost more than 90% of its megafauna by around 40,000 years ago, with the notable exceptions of several kangaroo species and the thylacine. A 2010 paper examining this issue showed that humans were likely to be one of the major factors in the extinction of many species in Australia although the authors of the research warned that one-factor explanations might be over-simplistic. The thylacine itself likely neared extinction throughout most of its range in mainland Australia by about 2,000 years ago. However, reliable accounts of thylacine survival in South Australia (though confined to the "thinly settled districts" and Flinders Ranges) and New South Wales (Blue Mountains) exist from as late as the 1830s, from both indigenous and European sources. A study proposes that the Dingo may have led to the extinction of the thylacine in mainland Australia because the dingo out competed the thylacine in preying on the Tasmanian nativehen. The dingo is also more likely to hunt in packs than the more solitary thylacine. Examinations of dingo and thylacine skulls show that although the dingo had a weaker bite, its skull could resist greater stresses, allowing it to pull down larger prey