Sadly (or thankfully), a real-life Jurassic Park is out of the question. We could use DNA from preserved mammoths to create elephants with mammoth-like qualities © Getty ImagesĪdded to that, we now realise that all animals are a product of their DNA and of the environment in which they live, along with the interaction between the two.Ĭreated in a lab, nurtured in the womb of a modern elephant, and raised in a world that has changed radically since mammoths went extinct thousands of years ago, the experiences of this new-age pachyderm will be different to those of its Ice Age doppelganger… all of which will conspire to make it less similar to the original woolly mammoth.īut does this matter? Many will argue that, if the de-extinct animal looks and acts like its predecessor, then that’s good enough. You could call it a ‘mammophant’ if you like, or an ‘elemoth’. This will be an animal that looks like a mammoth, but is really an elephant whose DNA has been altered so it can live in the cold. It will have long, shaggy fur, thick rolls of insulating body fat, and haemoglobin that can ferry oxygen around the body at sub-zero temperatures. When he is done, Church will have created not a true mammoth, but an elephant with a sprinkling of judiciously placed mammoth DNA. Will these animals be the same as the originals? For example, Prof George Church at Harvard Medical School aims to create a mammoth by ‘editing’ mammoth genes into elephant cells. Some are using cloning others, stem cell science. Other projects, however, involve assisted reproduction and some rather elegant genetics. The aim, over successive generations, is to create animals that look like quaggas. So scientists are choosing the zebras that look most like quaggas and letting them breed. Quaggas, for example, are related to living zebras. How do you ‘de-extinct’ something? An extinct quagga, a zebralike animal striped only on the head and shoulders © Getty Images Meanwhile, in South Africa, they’re trying to revive the quagga, a bizarre zebra-like creature with a stripeless behind! In South Korea, Japan and the US, three separate teams are racing to bring back that most iconic of Ice Age beasts, the woolly mammoth. In the UK, researchers are considering whether or not to bring back the so-called ‘Penguin of the North’, the great auk. In America, scientists are working on bringing back the passenger pigeon, a rosy-breasted bullet of a bird that once flocked in the billions and the heath hen, a stumpy avian wallflower that lived in the scrubby plains of New England. The gastric-brooding frog, which went extinct in the 1980s © Getty Images What other animals could we make de-extinct? The next step is to persuade these embryos to turn into frogs, something that Archer is convinced they will achieve. So far, the team has produced embryos that ‘almost’ turn into tadpoles but not quite. In Australia, Prof Michael Archer and colleagues are working on bringing back the gastric-brooding frog, a remarkable animal that nurtured its young in its stomach before burping up fully-formed froglets. Has an animal ever evolved itself into extinction?.Zoology in 30 seconds: conservation and extinction. Since then, scientists have been refining their methods and developing new de-extinction techniques. Sadly, the kid died a few minutes after she was born, so the poor ibex was not just the first animal to be brought back from extinction, but also the first to go extinct twice. The first milestone was in 2003 when European scientists resurrected the Pyrenean ibex, a type of mountain goat that had gone extinct a few years earlier. So how does de-extinction work, what are its limits, and do we really need to bring back long-dead animals? How feasible is de-extinction?ĭe-extinction is very much a science in development, but it’s moving at a rapid pace. The same techniques being developed to help resurrect extinct species can also be used to help save living species on the brink of extinction. But it’s not just about bringing back the dead. Thanks to developments in cloning and gene-editing technology, the prospect of bringing back extinct animals is looking more likely than ever.ĭe-extinction is about creating populations of healthy, genetically vibrant animals that can be released into the wild where they’ll be able to breed naturally and contribute positively to the environment. Or getting up close to a living, breathing Tasmanian tiger. Imagine travelling to the wilds of Siberia to see a woolly mammoth lumbering through its natural habitat. De-extinction: Can we bring extinct animals back from the dead?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |