bringing back extinct animals.... (1 Viewer)

[todd s]

No. I am not talking about dinosaurs like Jurassic Park. But, animlas such a mammoths, Irish Elk, Tasmanian Wolves, etc. I have heard about efforts to bring back mammoths using dna from frozen carcassas in Siberia. Just curious if this is a pipedream or could it be possible? And if they find usable dna. How do they do it?

 

[RickER]

I think i read for Mammoths, is they would use elephants. They would introduce the DNA into the egg, or some such thing. After a few generations of building up the DNA strands they would have a Mammoth. Thats about as short an answer i could make.

 

[BrettV]

The animals went extinct for a reason.

I'm scared where science is going.

 

[Lew Crippen]

Any source for this Todd? I'm skeptical, but I'd like to check out the reasoning before spouting off.

 

[KurtEP]

Wooly Mammoth To Live Again?, Japanese Scientists Announce Plans To Clone Prehistoric DNA - CBS News

I imagine it's only a matter of time. Of course, some animals may, as noted above, be extinct for a reason. Some have speculated that the atmosphere has changed significantly enough since the days of the dinosaurs that they would be unable to breathe well today. If true, that might preclude a Jurassic Park sort of thing.

 

[Garrett Lundy]

I have a similar question: If scientists were to clone a dead person, lets say King Tut, what would the birth certificate be like? Parents are Mr. and Mrs. Tut, or do they use the surrogate mother?

And what if they clone dead royalty in a country that still has a Noble class? Do resurected dead kinds supercede current living ones?

 

[Joseph Bolus]

Assuming that dinosaurs could be brought back in some fashion, the hope would be that they could acquire some immunity from present day bacteria from their surrogate "mother" -- in this case an ostrich. As for the atmosphere: it's probably "cleaner" now than in the latter years of the Creataceous Period when the dinos of that era had to survive with volcanic ash in the air.

BTW, if dinos were to be brought back at some point, probably the only ones that would have a chance of surviving would be the ones that were alive in the Creataceous Period. This would include the T-REX, Velociraptors, Triceratops, and (possibly) Iquanodons. This is mostly due to food source changes rather than atmospheric conditions.

 

[BrianW]

According to Larry Niven, the reason the dinosaurs went extinct is because they didn't have a space program.

 

[Glenn Overholt]

Yep, I can see it now. They clone some dinosaur and later it hatches some eggs. When the eggs break open, out pops a dodo bird!

Glenn

 

[JeremyErwin]

Bad luck, more likely. Some off them had the bad luck to be hunted to extinction.

 

[Jason Seaver]

I suspect these cloned animals wouldn't be much more than curiosities, anyway - are there enough viable mammoth DNA samples, for instance, that there would be a sustainable breeding population if they were just let loose in Siberia?

 

[todd s]

We need more corporate sponsers...

"Kentucky Fried Dodo"
"McMammoth"



Seriously, like I said before. I am not talking about dinosaurs. Just the more recent animals. Especially, the ones humans made extinct.

 

[Garrett Lundy]

Will the tazmanian wolf replace the cockapoo as the latest abomination to be a celebrity pet-du-jour? Only time will tell.

 

[Joe S.]

As mentioned above, it would be very, very hard to get a large enough genepool going to make an extinct species viable again. I would think that bringing back certain creatures like Wooly Mammoths would (and should) be done just to observe them and see "how they went about their business." Sort of like peering into history to see how they looked and lived. Even under the best of conditions, I doubt they could be reintroduced into the wild and thrive. They would be anomolies, but valuable ones to be sure.

The only way I could see anything beyond that would be if some sort of species was driven to extinction by man's hand and the ecosystem was thrown fatally out of whack. Like if polar bears went extinct and 100 years from now we figured out how to bring back the polar ice caps. Reintroducing the polar bear might actually help that exposed ecosystem get back on its feet alot quicker. Of course, that's a grossly hypothetical situation involving a metric ton of "ifs".

Sometimes science just sounds scary and it's not. I worry much more about genetic research on viruses and someone accidentally creating an airborne AIDS or such...

 

[ChristopherDAC]

There are a lot of frozen mammoth samples available — mammoth ivory is relatively available in the market (not being subject to the elephant-ivory bans) and I recall reading that some time back there was a banquet of paleontologists or some such at which the main dish was mammoth meat. Due to chemical degradation, it would be very difficult to find a complete genome in any one sample, but it seems much more possible to piece together genomes, maybe enough for a viable population. As to why, we might note that Indian elephants are widely used as draught animals in southern Asia, particularly in terrains where tractors &c. don't work properly (and they don't burn oil, either). It might be possible to employ mammoths for the same purpose in Siberia, where the cold swampy terrain has proven quite hostile to agriculture and other human uses. It's also worth noting that there were island populations of pygmy mammoths, & there would have to be a certain "cool factor" about a hairy elephant the size of a Shetland pony. Oh, and don't worry about the polar bears. They're in no particular danger, given that they must have survived the Medieval Climatic Optimum and before that the height of the interglacial, when global temperatures were significantly higher than they are now, & the ice coverage significantly less. The Greenland ice still hasn't receded to anything like its limits in 1200 AD. Of course, the people in northern Canada won't be thrilled (Churchill Ontario is essentially besieged by bears every year even now), but it's not a high-population-density area anyway.

 

[todd s]

Just bumping my thread for 2 reasons...One is that I was wondering if any progress has been made in the Mammoth or Tazmanian Wolf dna recovery? Also, I just saw 10,000 BC and the only cool thing in the movie was the extinct animals they showed (Mammoth's, Sabretooth Tiger and some giant ass chicken bird.) . The Irish Elk would be cool too bring back. Man that thing was big.

On a side note. Does anyone know if scientists are harvesting sperm and eggs from animals that are near extinction now? In the hopes that if they do go extinct we have samples to bring them back when technology permits.

 

[Bob McLaughlin]

Bringing back extinct threads?

There is a global seed vault in Norway but that's just for plants.

 

[todd s]

Where do you think I got this thread?...From the global old thread vault in Ron's basement.

 

[Jay Taylor]

Here's an interesting article from November 25, 2008 on Cloning the Woolly Mammoth:

Cloning the Woolly Mammoth

 

[Eric_L]

I'd be happy if we could just bring back the Wall Street Bull.