bringing back extinct animals....

Re: bringing back extinct animals....

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.

Re: bringing back extinct animals....

The animals went extinct for a reason.

I'm scared where science is going.

Re: bringing back extinct animals....

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

Re: bringing back extinct animals....

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.

Re: bringing back extinct animals....

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?

Re: bringing back extinct animals....

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.

Re: bringing back extinct animals....

Atmospheric conditions involve more than just the amount of “pollutants”. While it's true that there were periods with nasty things in the atmosphere like volcanic ash and sulphur, oxygen levels have also varied through the ages. Some eras before the Cretaceous period had a lot more oxygen in the atmosphere than we have now, allowing much larger creatures to exist. Double the height of an animal, and its lung surface area is quadrupled, but the number of cells requiring oxygen is about ten to twelve times as much for land animals. The same goes for lung-less creatures, like insects, whose intake of oxygen is roughly proportional to their surface area. Their oxygen requirements are multiplied by eight for every doubling of their length.


So a very large dinosaur (or insect) would not survive in our atmosphere.


As for recently extinct creatures like mammoths and Tasmanian tigers (which became extinct only a generation ago), I don't think there are any environmental or atmospheric reasons they couldn't survive today.
According to Larry Niven, the reason the dinosaurs went extinct is because they didn't have a space program.

Re: bringing back extinct animals....

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

Re: bringing back extinct animals....

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

Re: bringing back extinct animals....

I personally don't understand this line of reasoning.....It's not the Mammoth's fault that they went extinct, the ice age simply made food scarce and caused them to starve out of existence. We are no longer in an ice age. Perhaps we should take the initiative and try to give some of these animals a second chance at life. God knows we've killed off enough species throughout our history. Maybe not dinosaurs though: we don't need those things running around eating or trampling over us.

Re: bringing back extinct animals....

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?

Re: bringing back extinct animals....

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

Re: bringing back extinct animals....

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...

Re: bringing back extinct animals....

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.

Re: bringing back extinct animals....

Bringing back extinct threads?

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

Re: bringing back extinct animals....

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

Cloning the Woolly Mammoth

Re: bringing back extinct animals....

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

Re: bringing back extinct animals....

Or a cure for cancer that goes terribly wrong like in the movie "I Am Legend"

Re: bringing back extinct animals....

I think the mammoth being cloned is just a matter of time.