Re-Animators: Bringing Extinct Animals Back to Life

Vendredi, 17 Septembre 2010 00:00

Re-Animators: Bringing Extinct Animals Back to Life

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Ever since Steven Spielberg brought Jurassic Park to the big screen, teams of biotechnologists have been working to bring extinct animals back to life. They’ve already

resurrected the Bucardo, an extinct subspecies of goat. But they’ve also got rarer game in their sights. We round up the re-animation efforts, and handicaps the odds.


	Bucardo A subspecies of wild goat, or Ibex.	Aurochs Massive oxen, standing six feet high at the shoulder — two feet bigger than the biggest bovines of today.	Woolly Mammoth Longhaired elephants, basically.	Tasmanian Tiger A marsupial with a distinctly wolf like aspect.	Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor, Triceratops, Stegosaurus… etc. All dinosaurs, obviously.
When did they live?	Until 40 years ago, in the Pyrenees.	From the paleolithic — which ended about 12,000 years ago — up until about 1627 AD.	From the last ice age until 1700 BC.	4 million years ago up until the 20th century.	The Jurassic, i.e. 200 to 145 million years ago.
Why did they go extinct?	Hunting — though the last one was felled by a falling tree.	Hunting and diseases from domesticated cattle — which are descended from the Auroch — did them in.	Climate change is the culprit.	Competion with the dingo — wild canines decended from settlers dogs.	An asteroid which collided with the Earth, most likely.
Why should they comeback?	Extinction is sad.	European forests are choking on Beech trees — and Aurochs eat beech.	To provide the chief attraction for “Pleistocene Park” which already exists in Siberia.	Extinction is sad.	To provide the ultimate non-fiction footnote to Micheal Crichton’s sci-fi novel.
How do they propose to do it?	By cloning, with a domesticated goat carrying the embryo to term.	The old fashioned way — by breeding cattle decended from the Auroch back to their wild state.	The first step is finding a frozen sperm cell in one of the estimated 10 million Mammoths trapped under the Siberian ice.	By cloning — complete mitochondrial DNA has already been extracted from stuffed specimines.	Cloning, using dino- DNA found frozen in amber.
Chances of success…	It’s already happened, although the resulting clone was only alive for seven minutes. More info	Pretty good. Auroch DNA has been extracted from an old tooth, so breeders know what to aim for. More info	Not bad. African elephant DNA is 99% identical to the Wooly mammoth, and interbreeding is technically feasible. More info	Very unlikely. There are no species closelyrelated enough to carry a cloned embryo to term. More info	Extremely unlikely. It was science fiction, after all. More info