Just a few years from now, herds of woolly ‘mammoths’ could be roaming the Siberian tundra. Are dodos and dinosaurs next for de-extinction?
hat Alida Bailleul saw through the microscope made no sense. She was examining thin sections of fossilised skull from a young hadrosaur, a duck-billed, plant-eating beast that roamed what is now Montana 75m years ago, when she spotted features that made her draw a breath.
I don’t think we should rule out getting dinosaur DNA from dinosaur fossils - but we won’t if we don’t continue to lookThe idea of recovering biological material from dinosaur fossils is controversial and profound. Schweitzer doesn’t claim to have found dinosaur DNA – the evidence is too weak to be sure – but she says scientists should not dismiss the possibility that it could persist in prehistoric remains.
The next step is to use gene editing tools to rewrite the genome of an Asian elephant cell. If the 50 or so expected edits have the desired effect, the team will insert one of the “mammothified” elephant cells into an Asian elephant egg that has had the nucleus removed. A zap of electricity will be applied to spark fertilisation and the egg should start to divide and grow into an embryo.
Revive and Restore intends to bring back two extinct bird species, the heath hen and the passenger pigeon, as soon as the 2030s. After holding on for decades in Martha’s Vineyard, an island near Cape Cod in Massachusetts, the heath hen eventually died out in 1932. Under the de-extinction plan, scientists will create a replacement bird by editing the DNA of the closely related prairie chicken to carry heath hen genes.
“I think it’s crucial that, as we prioritise species and ecosystems for protection, we do so while considering what our planet will be like 50 or 100 years from now, rather than imagining that we can somehow turn back the clock and re-establish ecosystems of the past,” Shapiro says.
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