It Would Be Interesting to Bring These Animals Back, But What Do You Think?
The permanence of extinction may soon go the way of the dodo. The idea of bringing species back from the dead is gaining traction as scientific advances bring it closer to the realm of possibility. Today scientists are meeting in Washington, D.C. to discuss how they might really be able to resurrect animals like the passenger pigeon or the woolly mammoth.
Let’s go along with this for a bit and assume they figure out how to do this. We’ll suspend all the ethical and practical issues surrounding actually doing it for now and talk about the most interesting aspect: Which species should they bring back to life?
There could be many reasons to focus on a species, such as usefulness for humans, benefits to the environment, righting wrongs, or plain old nostalgia. But we find ourselves veering rather quickly toward one criterion: awesomeness.
Sure the story of the passenger pigeon has its appeal: There were billions of them, humans came along, then there were thousands, and then there were none, all in the space of just a few hundred years. The stories of mega-flocks blackening the skies and trampling the landscape are amazing. But wouldn’t you rather see a mega-bird? How about one that is 6 feet tall and carnivorous? Or a bird that is 12-feet tall? What about the biggest raptor that ever lived?
There are lots of barriers to bringing back any species, like the age and degradation of whatever DNA we have left in fossils and museum collections, and the need for a living species closely related enough to host this ancient DNA. We’ve tried to stay within the (very generous) zone of suspendible disbelief for our wish list, limiting ourselves to Pleistocene magafauna that lived just hundreds of thousands (rather than millions) of years ago (there’s no T-rex or megalodon), but our main focus was how loudly you would likely say “WHOA!” upon seeing the live animal.
Image: One of the many interpretations of what Diprotodon might have looked like. (Wikimedia commons)
Diprotodon
Nobody knows what Diprotodon looked like. But we’re pretty sure it was strange. The largest marsupial that ever lived, it is sometimes referred to as a giant wombat. They grew to be as big as a hippo, measuring up to 10-feet long and weighing more than 3 tons.
There really isn’t anything remotely like this creature around today, which is why we’d like to bring it back. That’s the only way we’ll ever know what this odd beast looked like.
Image: Dmitry Bogdanov/Wikimedia
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