I've copied the URL for an article on a company re-introducing the Tasmanian tiger. The company is also trying to re-introduce the wooly mammoth. Who else would like to hunt either one?
Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas company pursuing plans to bring woolly mammoths back to the Arctic tundra, is setting its sights on bringing back another...
www.dallasnews.com
I listened to a several hour podcast on this topic with world experts and the gist to my understanding is the following:
When an animal's last living member goes extinct, its gone for good, forever, irrevocably. Future technology will be unlikely to circumvent that fact for hundreds of years if ever.
What is really happening when someone claims they are bringing a species back to life:
By DNA sequencing extinct DNA fragments of DNA can be obtained. With enough of these fragments from various specimens, you may have a few percent of the original genome. With enough research between the extinct species and a living cousin where a perfect DNA sequence exists, comparisons and assumptions can be made about what each gene actually does. Science has figured this out with elephants and mammoths for example, so we know which genes effect molar development, ivory mass and curvature, fatty hump at the shoulders, hair growth, and other cold weather adaptations.
With that knowledge known, using CRISPR technology to modify genes you can maniuplate a fertilized elephant egg to give a modern elephant "mammoth like traits" that would be amusing to see in a menagerie. Amusing, but of very little scientific value because you just made a mutant African Elephant with goofy posture, too much hair, curly ivory, and a fatty hump on its shoulders.
When an animal dies the DNA instantly begins decomposition so for example if you took samples from your dead "man's best friend" 40 minutes after death it would be unlikely that sample would be flawless enough to create a clone of Fido. Now reconcile that with a frozen wooly mammoth that has been dead for 15,000 years where maybe 2-3% of DNA is intact and you understand why we can't make a wooly mammoth and have it gestate inside an elephant.
Same with chickens. We know how to make a chicken with a dinosaur like tail and actual teeth because they have these traits when developing inside the egg until a gene activates to fuse the teeth into a beak and shorten the tail into a suitable bird-like tail. Making a chicken that looks like a velociraptor isn't bringing the velociraptor back from the grave...it's still extinct. You just made an ugly chicken.
