The extinct Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, bears an uncanny resemblance to today’s canines.

Like dogs, wolves and dingoes, it was a carnivore with a svelte body, long, narrow snout and strong hind legs. But the Tasmanian tiger was a marsupial, meaning it had a pouch like a kangaroo. And despite the similarities, the Tasmanian tiger last shared a common ancestor with the placental pack some 160 million years ago during the Jurassic period.

“One of the things we were interested in was how come they look so much like dogs even though they are distantly related?” said Andrew Pask, a developmental biologist at the University of Melbourne and Museums Victoria who sequenced the thylacine genome last year.

He said it was one of the most apparent cases of convergent evolution, where two unrelated organisms evolve to look or function alike because of the similar niches they fill in their environments.