There is no good scientific reason to bring back an extinct species. Why would one bring them back? To put them in a theme park?
From Hendrik Poinar
I laughed when Steven Spielberg said that cloning extinct animals was inevitable. But I'm not laughing anymore, at least about mammoths. This is going to happen. It's just a matter of working out the details.
Every outbreak across the globe today stems from a descendant of the medieval plague.
There's no environment I can think of that would have remained constant enough to preserve dinosaur DNA.
Typically, there's a drive in science to do something just to say you've done it.
We know African and Asian elephants can interbreed, and they're separated by 5 million to 6 million years.
If we brought the mammoth back to Siberia, maybe that would be good for the ecosystems that are changing because of climate change.
Teeth actually turn out to be one of a couple of good sources of ancient DNA. The teeth, actually the enamel, is quite good at preserving the DNA, so it is a bit of time capsule so to speak.
Scientists have always thought that because mammoths roamed such a huge territory - from Western Europe to Central North America - that North American woolly mammoths were a sideshow of no particular significance to the evolution of the species.
The study of evolution is an evolution in itself.
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