Get ready for an exciting visit to a real-world Jurassic Park. Biologists at the Revive & Restore project are making plans to bring extinct species back to life, the Wire reported.
Woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and passenger pigeons are some of the choices being contemplated.
"The Mammoth Commeth," declares the cover of The New York Times magazine's latest issue, complete with an image of the long-extinct furry mastodon.
"Bringing extinct animals back to life is really happening - and it's going to be very, very cool," the subtitle reads. "Unless it ends up being very, very bad." It's not an altogether different headline than what the National Geographic wrote last April: "The revival of an extinct species is no longer a fantasy. But is it a good idea?," according to the Wire.
Detailing the plans of scientists bringing back the world's extinct animals, the story goes on to explain the difficulties they have to face in doing so.
The obvious and quite accurate comparison here would be to the science fiction of "Jurassic Park."
For one, the Times story details how the leaders of the Revive & Restore project collaborated with Russian researcher Sergey Zimov, who has already created "an experimental preserve in Siberia called Pleistocene Park, which he hopes to populate with woolly mammoths."
Even though Pleistocene doesn't quite have the ring of Jurassic, a park for formerly extinct animals is a park for formerly extinct animals, the Wire reported.
While the scientists bat around hopes for conservation, the really compelling reasons for bringing the animals back are the same as in the blockbuster film: It would be awesome!
"This may be the biggest attraction and possibly the biggest benefit of de-extinction," wrote two Stanford professors for a paper published in Science. "It would surely be very cool to see a living woolly mammoth."
Those who watched (or read) Jurassic Park, a story explicitly about the dangers of cloning and de-extinction, apparently took the wrong message, the Wire reported.
"That movie has done a lot for de-extinction," Stewart Brand, one of the leaders of the movement, told The Times "in all earnestness."
The passenger pigeon, which went extinct about a century ago, is the one animal that has been assigned the clearest plan. If all goes according to plan, the Revive & Restore scientists hope to have reintroduced the birds into the wild by 2060.
The ivory-billed woodpecker and the possibly-on-the-verge-of-going-extinct white rhino are some other potential candidates for de-extinction.
So what exactly are the things that could go "very, very bad"? Critics of the de-extinction plans aren't too worried about man-eating woolly mammoths; their concerns are much simpler:
According to the Wire, "De-extinction will cost too much money and take away from other conservation funding."
- "The animals already went extinct once, so they'll likely do so again. Is there really enough uninhabited cold tundra for woolly mammoths to thrive?"
- "Bringing species back to life could ruin the fear of extinction - a fear that drives a huge amount of money to conservation."
Apart from those concerns, the Revive & Restore team sounds determined enough to have you plan an early trip to Pleistocene Park.
