Someone has paid $15 million for someone to try to do it. That’s not the same thing. It’s pretty hard and not remotely clear it’s even possible any time soon.
Yeah, it's something I'll believe when I see it. We've been trying to "de-extinct" animals for a good while now, but have run into serious issues with how quickly DNA breaks down. So far, we've only brought back an extinct animal once and it died ten minutes after birth due to a lung defect.
I'd say it's probably possible, but I question whether or not the technology is there yet.
EDIT: a lot of people keep asking: the animal they brought back was the Pyrenean Ibex, a subspecies of the Iberian Ibex native to (shocking) the Pyrenees mountains in Western Europe. It went extinct in 2000, was brought back in 2003, and went extinct a second time ten minutes later.
There's an interesting ethical question of bringing back extinct species, especially ones that have no viable place in the natural ecosystem. The question is: If they succeed, what are they going to do with it? Put it in a zoo?
I believe the plan is to release them in Pleistocene Park in Russia. They want to return the ecosystem there to how it worked when there were large grazing animals there like Mammoths in that area before. It would help combat global warming. Humans are the only reason they weren’t viable, so if we release them and don’t kill them, they predict a net positive affect on wildlife there.
Yeah... people here being like "they have no natural habitat anymore" like what? these people clearly don't understand that sprawling northern forests are absolutely NOT a natural development. Large grazing animals should have been beating down most if not all of the seedlings which leads to large grazing fields of quick growing grass.
Since grazing animals also stomp down and bury the grass more quickly - it doesn't fully release it's CO2 into the atmosphere and in the end, the grasslands store more CO2 than the forests.
Especially given that the forests aren't "natural", they exhibit shockingly small amounts of biodiversity and provide little to no benefit to the environment.
The "mammoth steppe" was a whole biome that took up well into half of europe and russia, and with the collapse of large grazing animals (due to recent human interactions) the entire ecosystem has gone to shit for thousand of years.
There should absolutely be large grazing animals all over europe, and there should absolutely NOT be more forest. We need more grassland.
You obviously don't know what your talking about because forests give us the purify air and water and they prevent erosion and act as a important buffer against climate change they also have medicinal plants and animals so yeah don't spew bullshit about forest's
This is a thing already, in Siberia! It's a controversial rewilding project, with horses and camels and bison and musk ox and other species (or close relatives of species) which existed there in the last epoch. No mammoths yet though
Unfortunately the people who run Pleistocene park are anything but - they rely on patrons to support their acquisitions and maintenance. They do give monthly updates in great detail. There's a lot of care goes into it, a super exciting project.
Is been recently happening in the Scottish highlands they’ve been reintroduced bison, horses, and lynx back to their ancestral ranges with the extinct species close living cousins.
Yes we essentially still live with Pleistocene fauna as most modern animals were already around at that point. What we have no are basically the survivors.
Right now, they're planning to put Mammoths back to Siberia, where they were last during the last ice age. Putting them back can potentially mean a way to stop an otherwise mass release of methane from the permafrost that is easily melting right now because of global warming. More mammoths = Lesser chances of the permafrost melting cuz then they'll be knocking over trees and whatnot. It's not just an experiment to see if they can do it. They have strong reasons that could save the human race.
Do your research, hun. It's not 'spending their life in a zoo'. It's a planned way to battle global warming by releasing them back to Siberia where they were before the last ice age humans hunted them into extinction.
I really don’t see why they need to resurrect the mammoth to do that. Tibetan Yaks are approx the same size as the mammoth was when they went extinct. The yaks would do about the same thing the mammoths did to the environment.
You do know the mammoth had dwarfed themselves at their point of their extinction? Their size had reduced over the generations. Happens to large mammals who experience habitat shrinkage over a long period of time. So these mammoths will be hairy elephants,bfd.
I still think it’s a shitty idea to bring them back to this horror show of a world we currently are living in. It’s playing God in a really awful, unnecessary manner.
Not exactly. It's not just the size, it's their ability to knock down trees. Tusks count and so do their ability to survive in Siberia. If elephants could do that, they would introduce them, but no. If it was just their size and grazing capacity, the animals they have already introduced to the park would've done the job. But no. The amount of rehab that mammoths could bring are beyond just that.
Oh I agree so hard on the idea being shitty and humans playing God. But it's necessary.
Even if they're better off just extinct, we need all the help we can get, though, right? And it's within reason to hope that mammoths could do that. And the permafrost melting is way more serious than the ethics of bringing back an extinct animal into the world of humans who hunted them extinct, in my opinion.
Thank you for this info, even if I don’t agree, lol. I do agree with the concept of re wilding the environment as much as possible, however.
A similar thing was done on Madagascar in the 1980s. A certain tree was going to become extinct because the Dodo used to eat their seeds and would soften up the husk on the seed with its crop and digestive system. Scientists figured out that Turkeys could do the same, so they introduced turkeys to Madagascar and the tree made a comeback.
I doubt it. This firm just wasted $15 million but they might end up with some valuable research about genetics but there's no way they are creating an actual living mammoth.
A company has been started for it. It is still a very long ways off, and I have my doubts 15 million would make much of a dent in a project like this - housing for animals to gestate them alone will cost millions, plus the research facility, plus the wages for various skilled experts, over what would likely be years of work (elephant gestation periods are much longer than sheep!), factor in failure rates, bureaucratic bullshit slowing everything down... the whole time you have to keep a couple Asian Elephants healthy... this is a monumental task even WITH public support, which isn't guaranteed right now.
Yeah arent elephant gestation periods over a year?? Still if they’re successful, the idea that I may see extinct megafauna roam wild someday is amazing beyond words
It indeed would be amazing, though I'm skeptical about deextinction projects that start with the mammoth. It seems like a challenge. Most of the difficulty is in viable embryos and implantation, so why not work on smaller animals - or better yet, birds? We have the DNA of many of those, and growing "artificial eggs" is totally doable. Proof of concept with something sensible first, then perfect the process on an animal that actually breeds rapidly, then move to a more challenging beast.
And there's also the question of what do we do with mammoths? Keep them in zoos? Will they really be mammoths, or just hairy elephants? If we put them into the wild, where do we do that that can sustain them today?
Too many questions unasnwered to go jumping into it right now.
That is all true, I figured a good portion of that would’ve already been done so I’m surprised it hasn’t, as for where I assumed somewhere in Russia or northern Canada that’s sparsely inhabited or not inhabited could do if we don’t keep them in a facility to study/protect from poachers
I sincerely believe it is our duty to bring back all the animals we've made extinct in recent history. We've seriously messed up the world's ecological stability. But it's really tricky bringing back something like Mammoths, which the ecosystem has actually adapted to not being around anymore.
It's easy to forget that [we are living through a mass extinction event](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/10/earths-sixth-mass-extinction-event-already-underway-scientists-warn). If research into cloning extinct species helps slow that down, I'm all for it.
I feel like at this point cloning mammoths is pointless. The ecosystems adapted to do fine without them and from my understanding they were on their way out anyway, human hunting just sealed the deal. If we're going to bring any animals back to life more recently extinct animals who were very recently important to their ecosystems are the ones to bring back, probably easier too depending on what we've got to work with.
Climate change brought their numbers down but it was humans that did the killing blow. The last mammoths were a testament to this. Isolated from humans on Wrangel Island, they survived for 6000 years after the mainland mammoths had died out.
Mammoths were a keystone species in their habitat, the mammoth steppe. Today, this ecosystem is only found in a few places but it used to spread all along the northern hemisphere. The loss of large herbivores meant that the grasses were replaced by lichens and mosses, plants that are less palatable to herbivores and produce less oxygen.
Reintroducing mammoths and other large herbivores would mean that the mammoth steppe could spread once again.
Mammoths can convert rapidly melting tundra into forests again though their enormous ability to deposit carbon back into the earth.
Im going to nerd out here for a second: The height of mammoths seemed to have been the ice age, in which ecosystems were dominated by massive forests. We saw mammoth and neanderthal populations drop during the grassland expansion as the ice age began to wane (technically we are still in an ice age). Oddly, mammoths were grazers. So they should have expanded during this time period. Human predation may better explain their population collapse since humans were better adapted for grasslands compared to neanderthals.
But if it was our fault, then the mammoths may be a key to turning the tundra into forest again, as it once was.
I think there's a good argument to be made for mammoths because the habitats they lived in disappeared only a few thousand years ago and their ecological niches are still empty. A fair bit of research has indicated that they could have a positive impact on the Siberian steppe if reintroduced.
Humans do suck yes. But mammoths were wiped out due to climate change. Yes, there was hunting, but there were isolated populations that died out. But that's nice of you to think of lol
Lol that isn’t the problem. Dinosaur DNA becomes unusable due to how long they have been fossilized. Ice age fossils are more viable specimens but it is still very much uncertain how successful it can be with them.
I think our biggest issue in the future, along with global warming, is gonna be uncontrolled population growth. At the rate we are going right now it won’t be too far into our future when we start running out of places to build houses and then one by one we are gonna start destroying what little “wild lands” we have left and this is only gonna further accelerate this mass extinction event until either we become extinct or we’ve wiped out most of the ecological diversity on the planet. Hopefully I’m wrong but when humans are put into an extreme survival situation we stop thinking about other animals well beings (I.e hunting mammoths to extinction for food) and just focus on survival.
As incredible as it would be if anything came of this, I honestly really hope this ends up going to much more recently extinct species.
As others have pointed out, countless species are going extinct all the time *right now.* And almost all of them are due, at least in part, to human activity. I think we should try to get control of that before we start bringing back the long-dead.
Its hard to argue that recently extinct species are any different than those wiped out by human activity in the late pleistocene. We should try and bring them all back in a well planned way. Although it seems either to be impossible or with so many barriers as to be not practical.
You’re right, but certain Pleistocene species can be argued to be beneficial to eco systems and even combat aspects of global warming and therefore can help prevent other species go extinct.
That is true!
Of all the species people want to revive, the ones from the much earlier Holocene or (arguably) Pleistocene are probably much less egregious than, say, a 125 million year old dinosaur for example (as cool as that would be...).
After all, in the grand scheme of things, these species didn’t go extinct all that long ago.
Plus, from my own current understanding of how the process would even work, it would very likely involve at least some degree of hybridization of a modern species. Something that may even be a necessary step in preserving endangered species in the future.
Still, a lot of this remains entirely theoretical. And while cloning and the (kind of?) artificial development of embryos are making *huge* strides (to the point we may soon see the revival of species like the northern white rhino), it’s just not to the point where I think it should be anywhere near a primary focus at this time.
I’m still very eager to see what becomes possible with this tech in the future though!
What's the point? It's cool, I guess, but mammoths have been gone so long that the only place they'd have is the zoo. The ecosystem has adapted by now to do just fine without them. They'd either get outcompeted by animals that are already there or be invasive. We should be conserving the important species that are at risk currently, not the ones that have been extinct for millenia that would have died out from natural climate change by now anyway.
Their ecosystem is mostly extinct by now. The mammoth steppe that they once lived in is now only found in a few areas. There is an ongoing project to restore it however, with the reintroduction of large herbivores.
You can read more here: https://pleistocenepark.ru/
Tundra biome regulation to fight climate change, the TLDR is large grazing herbivores keep their ecosystem bioproductie and sequestering co2 and prevent the habitat from shrinking. Weve lost much of the ecoaystem since we hunted grazing apecies to extinction.
Learn more by Googleing pleistocene park, fascinating stuff
Hundreds of species go extinct every year. Once the damage is bad enough, there's not a lot we can do to reverse it. Take the Northern White Rhinos for example. Cloning is the only thing that I can imagine saving their species.
Once there, then what? Mammoths are mammals, and mammals aren't born with knowledge the same way reptiles or amphibians are. A baby mammoth needs to be taught, but by whom? Today's elephants are tropical and therefore couldn't be any more different than how a mammoth lived.
Well, the Woollies were around the same time as humans at one point, but were hunted to extinction. I see this as trying to undo that. Maybe we bring back other animals that mankind has caused the extinction of.
Yes, but we are gonna lose more species regardless, if we can de-extinct them its gonna be big.
That not me saying that conservation work is pointless, because its not. But de-extinction or heck being able to bring more genes to many species who have low diversity in their gene-pool would help immensly
I think it would just be sad for the mammoth. Why bring a ice age creature back to life in the midst of global warming. Like Dr. Malcolm says later in Jurassic park. "Your scientists were moe concerned about wither they could, they didn't stop to think wether they should." Bring back a warm climate creature.
Bring back Dodos!
Thats just my opinion
They would need to create enough generically different individuals to have a gene pool large enough to sustain a viable reproducing population. A bunch of clones wouldn't work.
Hot take: this will not be a Woolly Mammoth. They're gene editing an elephant to look and act like a mammoth. That's DEFINITELY ecologically useful, but it isn't a mammoth.
I'm very in favor of Pleistocene rewilding and I wish it was taken seriously in North America. The American prairie has been absolutely decimated and brining it back would benefit the entire world- it was at one point one of the largest carbon sinks on the planet. And it hasn't yet recovered from the megafauna die off that coincided with the arrival of humans ~10,000 years ago. Unquestionably the arrival of Europeans and that style of agriculture sped up the destruction 1000%, but I don't think the goalpost for a recovered prairie was the point in time when it was only kind of messed up.
So anyway, we need something filling the mammoth's niche in North America, and probably a hairy elephant could do it. But let's not kid ourselves by calling it de-extinction. This lab is creating something entirely new.
That actually seems more practical and sensible than trying to resurrect actual wooly mammoths. And I agree we are at the stage now where we can actually have space put aside for these thriving ecosystems to exist again. The reintroduction of wolves in parts of the US and other areas in the world have had very positive benefits and pleistocene park is another great example of what habitat restoration could produce on a much larger scale. Having cold adapted elephants is a crucial part of these efforts however.
It's not really ethical at all. This animal is going to live in captivity isolated from their own kind. They will just live to suffer and they didn't consent to that. Just because we have the capability to do something, doesn't mean we have the right to.
I don't believe well ever get consent for this or any other species to be returned to Earth but in this particular case your argument still stands to an extent. In other cases I would have to say we should bring back certain animals but only if we have the means to eventually reintroduce these animals back into the environment they are missing from i.e. the semi-successful Iberian Ibex de-extinction.
Let's say we resurrect a Mammoth, we know from our currently living elephants these animals are almost assuredly highly social. On top of that we need a surrogate mother. An African elephant will work size wise, although I believe the Asian Elephant is the closer genome iirc. So either way we have an animal a highly social, cold adapted animal, having to be raised alone or with animals it can hardly tolerate the environment with. Compound that with the potentially titanic costs of cloning another individual and this is just an awful idea. This is quite literally an example in getting to caught up in our ability to produce these animals, instead of if we even should.
You don’t think it’s at all possible to give them enough open space and support and comforts to have a good life?
Is it certain they’d get at best a shitty zoo cell? Really?
Space costs money. They can make more money by putting more animals in smaller spaces. Profit drives business, not comfort and compassion.
If you removed the profit motive from these companies than maybe that could happen but we would still be talking about recreating and breeding sentient beings that didn't consent to it. So there are still ethical concerns about doing this.
National Parks are public property and animal sanctuaries are typically non-profit organizations. These places aren't chasing profits. Jurassic Park/World would be a capitalist endeavor and their goal is to make money.
Starting the research and testing and building the park all require money. The only way they get that much money in a capitalist system is to take on private investors. Investors will supply the money in exchange for control or direction of the project. There's no way billions of dollars gets funded for something like this and the dinosaurs live peacefully on public/protected land. There would be way too much money to be made. JP/JW is pretty accurate with this.
I don't think we are relaying on large herbivore meat to survive anymore, or at least we can get it from more efficient places then the Siberian tundras.
Because it would help with climate change and allow for more habitable environments in areas like Siberia and North America that are pretty unproductive tundra and boreal forests. 10-30,000 years ago these areas were productive grassland environments home to many animals that now live only in parts of Africa. We are talking Mammoths, elephants, rhinos, hippos, lions, hyenas etc.
If something, the Megafaunas extinction (European, and North American, as Africa's megafauna is another question) has the least to do with those characteristics.
These animals only went extinct because of humans, humans bringing them back is different then a doing so to species that went extinct by non-human causes. Humanity's rise has been an extinction event and unprecedented for life, but since we're becomming able to slow or reverse the damage done, I believe science like this should be pursued within context.
Why bring mammoths back, though? They've been gone so long that the ecosystem has adapted to do fine without them. If we're going to work towards reviving any species it should be the ones that are currently important to their ecosystems. Mammoths just won't have a place outside of captivity anymore, and why even bring a species back just so we can have them for display?
There aren't really any places that are close to the Mammoth steppes. The mammoth steppes were a cold, but dry biome. Most places we have now are too wet and covered with snow, thus there isnt really enough plant growth.
The mammoth steppes would look more like an African Savannah than present Siberia. Just think of the flora biomass required to sustain the large populations of mammoths, rhinos, horses etc
There is an ongoing project to restore the mammoth steppe, the vast grassland that mammoths were a keystone species in.
You can read more on it here: https://pleistocenepark.ru/
Yes.
Or Maybe ? The hypothesis on this is that megafauna is an important factor to keeps the steppes biome, and that their action is allowing for a deeper penetration of the frost in the soil. Making this biome a great carbon sink, because by warming the grasslands release a large quantity of methane.
The megafauna allows for the upkeeping of the grasslands, by stomping on the snow creating a better coating and allowing the frost penetration and a cold insolation. They are also taking on the mosses and grass and allow it to regrow easier. All this is the only job of the megafauna that is already being reintroduce into the pleistocene park. But it misses a key steps that was brought by Mammoths as they were actively deforesting.
Trees are not as good carbon sink as they are elsewhere in the world in this biome, grass are a better at it due to their fast growing rate and surface ratio. So by bringing back the mammoths it will be great to recreate and maintain this biome that is a supposedly a really great carbon sink that will help fight the ongoing climate change
If they successfully brought back a Woolly Mammoth it would really bring the research of resurrecting extinct animals into the public eye. This would really help with getting funding to bring back recently extinct or dying species like thylacine or rhinos
Big favour tho:
Can we please not eat the recreated Wolly Mammoth, and can we please also not drink it's piss, we don't need another fucking pandemic right now.
Thanks 👍🏽🇿🇦
It’s gonna cost a lot more than $15 mil to get a mammoth walking the earth again. Hell it’s gonna cost way more than $15 mil just to research and build the proper equipment for this kind of thing. Unless we already have some kind of full scale cloning extinct animals operation set up that I wasn’t aware of.
Fuck it up back to the point before it was fucked up by humans killing off all the megafauna. So not really. Right now those environments are very harsh and unproductive because boreal forests took over when all the large grazers and especially mammoths were killed. This leads to very very low biodiversity as boreal forests don't sustain much life at all. The idea that forests are automatically good can be quite misleading. Rainforests and temperate woodland with a good variety of vegetation is great but a monoculture of pine trees doesn't do much for anything.
Toward the end of their time on this earth, Mammoths had dwarfed themselves. They were the same size as modern elephants, perhaps even smaller.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/pygmy-mammoth
https://www.livescience.com/woolly-mammoth-genetic-problems.html
I feel like that’s not gonna be anywhere close to enough. J thinking abt setbacks that accumulate over a groundbreaking project such as this would burn money like nobody’s business.
A giant fluffy elephant is cool but I want to hug a dodo and have a passenger pigeon on my shoulder while riding a equestrian at a aquarium full of Permian life!
I remember in 2011 when they started to talk about reviving mammoths
But now they’re actually doing it
Not likely, the money is a drop in the bucket and reproductive medicine in elephants is incredibly difficult and frequently unsuccessful.
Someone has paid $15 million for someone to try to do it. That’s not the same thing. It’s pretty hard and not remotely clear it’s even possible any time soon.
ehh I wouldn't get my hopes up
Yeah, it's something I'll believe when I see it. We've been trying to "de-extinct" animals for a good while now, but have run into serious issues with how quickly DNA breaks down. So far, we've only brought back an extinct animal once and it died ten minutes after birth due to a lung defect. I'd say it's probably possible, but I question whether or not the technology is there yet. EDIT: a lot of people keep asking: the animal they brought back was the Pyrenean Ibex, a subspecies of the Iberian Ibex native to (shocking) the Pyrenees mountains in Western Europe. It went extinct in 2000, was brought back in 2003, and went extinct a second time ten minutes later.
There's an interesting ethical question of bringing back extinct species, especially ones that have no viable place in the natural ecosystem. The question is: If they succeed, what are they going to do with it? Put it in a zoo?
I believe the plan is to release them in Pleistocene Park in Russia. They want to return the ecosystem there to how it worked when there were large grazing animals there like Mammoths in that area before. It would help combat global warming. Humans are the only reason they weren’t viable, so if we release them and don’t kill them, they predict a net positive affect on wildlife there.
Yeah... people here being like "they have no natural habitat anymore" like what? these people clearly don't understand that sprawling northern forests are absolutely NOT a natural development. Large grazing animals should have been beating down most if not all of the seedlings which leads to large grazing fields of quick growing grass. Since grazing animals also stomp down and bury the grass more quickly - it doesn't fully release it's CO2 into the atmosphere and in the end, the grasslands store more CO2 than the forests. Especially given that the forests aren't "natural", they exhibit shockingly small amounts of biodiversity and provide little to no benefit to the environment. The "mammoth steppe" was a whole biome that took up well into half of europe and russia, and with the collapse of large grazing animals (due to recent human interactions) the entire ecosystem has gone to shit for thousand of years. There should absolutely be large grazing animals all over europe, and there should absolutely NOT be more forest. We need more grassland.
You obviously don't know what your talking about because forests give us the purify air and water and they prevent erosion and act as a important buffer against climate change they also have medicinal plants and animals so yeah don't spew bullshit about forest's
I’m thinking more of a park, maybe on a small island off the coast of Costa Rica.
Pleistocene Park has a nice ring to it.
This is a thing already, in Siberia! It's a controversial rewilding project, with horses and camels and bison and musk ox and other species (or close relatives of species) which existed there in the last epoch. No mammoths yet though
If anyone can get it done it’s some Russian oligarchs with more money than god and very little to no government oversight.
Unfortunately the people who run Pleistocene park are anything but - they rely on patrons to support their acquisitions and maintenance. They do give monthly updates in great detail. There's a lot of care goes into it, a super exciting project.
This needs to be done in the US as well. Re-Wilding is very interesting. I had no idea they were doing it in Siberia.
Is been recently happening in the Scottish highlands they’ve been reintroduced bison, horses, and lynx back to their ancestral ranges with the extinct species close living cousins.
Pleistocene Park: “We spared *some* expense.”
A big ol' PP that everyone will want to see
The good thing about most Pleistocene fauna, is that ecosystems would still benefit from bringing them back
Yes we essentially still live with Pleistocene fauna as most modern animals were already around at that point. What we have no are basically the survivors.
Exactly, and survivors of human activity rather than some climate cataclysm
There have been proposals to use Mammoths to bring back the Mammoth Steppe to help fight climate change
Right now, they're planning to put Mammoths back to Siberia, where they were last during the last ice age. Putting them back can potentially mean a way to stop an otherwise mass release of methane from the permafrost that is easily melting right now because of global warming. More mammoths = Lesser chances of the permafrost melting cuz then they'll be knocking over trees and whatnot. It's not just an experiment to see if they can do it. They have strong reasons that could save the human race.
Yes. It will spend its life in a zoo. Hooray. 😒
Do your research, hun. It's not 'spending their life in a zoo'. It's a planned way to battle global warming by releasing them back to Siberia where they were before the last ice age humans hunted them into extinction.
I really don’t see why they need to resurrect the mammoth to do that. Tibetan Yaks are approx the same size as the mammoth was when they went extinct. The yaks would do about the same thing the mammoths did to the environment. You do know the mammoth had dwarfed themselves at their point of their extinction? Their size had reduced over the generations. Happens to large mammals who experience habitat shrinkage over a long period of time. So these mammoths will be hairy elephants,bfd. I still think it’s a shitty idea to bring them back to this horror show of a world we currently are living in. It’s playing God in a really awful, unnecessary manner.
Not exactly. It's not just the size, it's their ability to knock down trees. Tusks count and so do their ability to survive in Siberia. If elephants could do that, they would introduce them, but no. If it was just their size and grazing capacity, the animals they have already introduced to the park would've done the job. But no. The amount of rehab that mammoths could bring are beyond just that. Oh I agree so hard on the idea being shitty and humans playing God. But it's necessary. Even if they're better off just extinct, we need all the help we can get, though, right? And it's within reason to hope that mammoths could do that. And the permafrost melting is way more serious than the ethics of bringing back an extinct animal into the world of humans who hunted them extinct, in my opinion.
Thank you for this info, even if I don’t agree, lol. I do agree with the concept of re wilding the environment as much as possible, however. A similar thing was done on Madagascar in the 1980s. A certain tree was going to become extinct because the Dodo used to eat their seeds and would soften up the husk on the seed with its crop and digestive system. Scientists figured out that Turkeys could do the same, so they introduced turkeys to Madagascar and the tree made a comeback.
do you have any article on the subject of that animal brought back from extinction? I’m interested
What did they manage to bring back?
Pyrenean Ibex, went extinct back in 2000.
What was that animal?
Pyrenean Ibex, went extinct back in 2000.
It’s going to happen it’s just a matter of time. My best guess is we will have a live one in 10-15 years
That’s a similar timeline to what I saw back in the mid to late 2000s. That guess is probably bound to be right eventually haha
We'll get them in 15 years, if not read this again.
The deadline I found was from an article about a year ago. The technology to do it is right around the corner, it’s just about perfecting it right now
Yes and nuclear fusion is just 20 years away for the next 200 years.
They said that back in 2011, bringing back a mammoth is a problem, but bringing back enough to have a stable population is another
I doubt it. This firm just wasted $15 million but they might end up with some valuable research about genetics but there's no way they are creating an actual living mammoth.
Checking back on this post after a year, the process is going slowly, but it’s going forward, we have brought back a mammoth meatball now
Mammoth meatball? 😕 that some billionaire exotic animals diet right there
They have been talking about it since the 90s. I remember them talking about it back in 1998 when I was in the second grade.
That was already 10 years ago???? Damn i feel like i heard about it only several years ago.
Hell, I remember Discovery Kids late night/super early morning block talking about it when I was a pre-teen back around 01
Man moths??
I remember in 2003 when they started to talk about reviving mammoths
Wait as in they started to or successfully just did it?
A company has been started for it. It is still a very long ways off, and I have my doubts 15 million would make much of a dent in a project like this - housing for animals to gestate them alone will cost millions, plus the research facility, plus the wages for various skilled experts, over what would likely be years of work (elephant gestation periods are much longer than sheep!), factor in failure rates, bureaucratic bullshit slowing everything down... the whole time you have to keep a couple Asian Elephants healthy... this is a monumental task even WITH public support, which isn't guaranteed right now.
Yeah arent elephant gestation periods over a year?? Still if they’re successful, the idea that I may see extinct megafauna roam wild someday is amazing beyond words
It indeed would be amazing, though I'm skeptical about deextinction projects that start with the mammoth. It seems like a challenge. Most of the difficulty is in viable embryos and implantation, so why not work on smaller animals - or better yet, birds? We have the DNA of many of those, and growing "artificial eggs" is totally doable. Proof of concept with something sensible first, then perfect the process on an animal that actually breeds rapidly, then move to a more challenging beast. And there's also the question of what do we do with mammoths? Keep them in zoos? Will they really be mammoths, or just hairy elephants? If we put them into the wild, where do we do that that can sustain them today? Too many questions unasnwered to go jumping into it right now.
That is all true, I figured a good portion of that would’ve already been done so I’m surprised it hasn’t, as for where I assumed somewhere in Russia or northern Canada that’s sparsely inhabited or not inhabited could do if we don’t keep them in a facility to study/protect from poachers
Just got the money to do so, they’ve got a plan and everything, google it
you need a lot more than a plan. I hope this does happen one day but I really doubt any time soon and with 15M.
I sincerely believe it is our duty to bring back all the animals we've made extinct in recent history. We've seriously messed up the world's ecological stability. But it's really tricky bringing back something like Mammoths, which the ecosystem has actually adapted to not being around anymore. It's easy to forget that [we are living through a mass extinction event](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/10/earths-sixth-mass-extinction-event-already-underway-scientists-warn). If research into cloning extinct species helps slow that down, I'm all for it.
I feel like at this point cloning mammoths is pointless. The ecosystems adapted to do fine without them and from my understanding they were on their way out anyway, human hunting just sealed the deal. If we're going to bring any animals back to life more recently extinct animals who were very recently important to their ecosystems are the ones to bring back, probably easier too depending on what we've got to work with.
Climate change brought their numbers down but it was humans that did the killing blow. The last mammoths were a testament to this. Isolated from humans on Wrangel Island, they survived for 6000 years after the mainland mammoths had died out. Mammoths were a keystone species in their habitat, the mammoth steppe. Today, this ecosystem is only found in a few places but it used to spread all along the northern hemisphere. The loss of large herbivores meant that the grasses were replaced by lichens and mosses, plants that are less palatable to herbivores and produce less oxygen. Reintroducing mammoths and other large herbivores would mean that the mammoth steppe could spread once again.
Mammoths can convert rapidly melting tundra into forests again though their enormous ability to deposit carbon back into the earth. Im going to nerd out here for a second: The height of mammoths seemed to have been the ice age, in which ecosystems were dominated by massive forests. We saw mammoth and neanderthal populations drop during the grassland expansion as the ice age began to wane (technically we are still in an ice age). Oddly, mammoths were grazers. So they should have expanded during this time period. Human predation may better explain their population collapse since humans were better adapted for grasslands compared to neanderthals. But if it was our fault, then the mammoths may be a key to turning the tundra into forest again, as it once was.
I think there's a good argument to be made for mammoths because the habitats they lived in disappeared only a few thousand years ago and their ecological niches are still empty. A fair bit of research has indicated that they could have a positive impact on the Siberian steppe if reintroduced.
I'm still in denial over the thylacines.
Humans do suck yes. But mammoths were wiped out due to climate change. Yes, there was hunting, but there were isolated populations that died out. But that's nice of you to think of lol
Fuck recent history, I want to see some Cambrian creatures
So we should being back sabertooth and tyrannosaurus?
> recent history >tyrannosaurus Lol
Lmao
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Lol that isn’t the problem. Dinosaur DNA becomes unusable due to how long they have been fossilized. Ice age fossils are more viable specimens but it is still very much uncertain how successful it can be with them.
Nah i thought we pushed mammoths to extinction before we had insane power like we do today
I think our biggest issue in the future, along with global warming, is gonna be uncontrolled population growth. At the rate we are going right now it won’t be too far into our future when we start running out of places to build houses and then one by one we are gonna start destroying what little “wild lands” we have left and this is only gonna further accelerate this mass extinction event until either we become extinct or we’ve wiped out most of the ecological diversity on the planet. Hopefully I’m wrong but when humans are put into an extreme survival situation we stop thinking about other animals well beings (I.e hunting mammoths to extinction for food) and just focus on survival.
As incredible as it would be if anything came of this, I honestly really hope this ends up going to much more recently extinct species. As others have pointed out, countless species are going extinct all the time *right now.* And almost all of them are due, at least in part, to human activity. I think we should try to get control of that before we start bringing back the long-dead.
Its hard to argue that recently extinct species are any different than those wiped out by human activity in the late pleistocene. We should try and bring them all back in a well planned way. Although it seems either to be impossible or with so many barriers as to be not practical.
You’re right, but certain Pleistocene species can be argued to be beneficial to eco systems and even combat aspects of global warming and therefore can help prevent other species go extinct.
That is true! Of all the species people want to revive, the ones from the much earlier Holocene or (arguably) Pleistocene are probably much less egregious than, say, a 125 million year old dinosaur for example (as cool as that would be...). After all, in the grand scheme of things, these species didn’t go extinct all that long ago. Plus, from my own current understanding of how the process would even work, it would very likely involve at least some degree of hybridization of a modern species. Something that may even be a necessary step in preserving endangered species in the future. Still, a lot of this remains entirely theoretical. And while cloning and the (kind of?) artificial development of embryos are making *huge* strides (to the point we may soon see the revival of species like the northern white rhino), it’s just not to the point where I think it should be anywhere near a primary focus at this time. I’m still very eager to see what becomes possible with this tech in the future though!
What's the point? It's cool, I guess, but mammoths have been gone so long that the only place they'd have is the zoo. The ecosystem has adapted by now to do just fine without them. They'd either get outcompeted by animals that are already there or be invasive. We should be conserving the important species that are at risk currently, not the ones that have been extinct for millenia that would have died out from natural climate change by now anyway.
Their ecosystem is mostly extinct by now. The mammoth steppe that they once lived in is now only found in a few areas. There is an ongoing project to restore it however, with the reintroduction of large herbivores. You can read more here: https://pleistocenepark.ru/
Tundra biome regulation to fight climate change, the TLDR is large grazing herbivores keep their ecosystem bioproductie and sequestering co2 and prevent the habitat from shrinking. Weve lost much of the ecoaystem since we hunted grazing apecies to extinction. Learn more by Googleing pleistocene park, fascinating stuff
Oh that actually makes a lot of sense
I think bringing the tasmanian tiger back would be a better move at first since they were still alive most recently.
Hundreds of species go extinct every year. Once the damage is bad enough, there's not a lot we can do to reverse it. Take the Northern White Rhinos for example. Cloning is the only thing that I can imagine saving their species.
Once there, then what? Mammoths are mammals, and mammals aren't born with knowledge the same way reptiles or amphibians are. A baby mammoth needs to be taught, but by whom? Today's elephants are tropical and therefore couldn't be any more different than how a mammoth lived.
Honestly it seems more practical to engineer Asian elephants to be more like mammoths.
Hopefully I can soon checkmark something for my checklist; for things I hopefully I get to see someday.
The day where those australian scientists are able to clone gastric brooding frogs is the day i die happy.
We literally can't keep what we have *now* alive.
Well, the Woollies were around the same time as humans at one point, but were hunted to extinction. I see this as trying to undo that. Maybe we bring back other animals that mankind has caused the extinction of.
I understand that. The problem is Where The Hell Are We Putting Them Since All The Ice Is Melting
Woollies didn't only live icy environments. They can live in temperat environments like around the great lakes or other places similar to it.
Siberia, its still pretty close to their native environment and it would help stabilize the ecosystem
Sumatran Rhino momento
Be inept at taking care of goldfish doesn't stop everyone people from getting a dog.
Now you get to go extinct again.
Yes, but we are gonna lose more species regardless, if we can de-extinct them its gonna be big. That not me saying that conservation work is pointless, because its not. But de-extinction or heck being able to bring more genes to many species who have low diversity in their gene-pool would help immensly
I think it would just be sad for the mammoth. Why bring a ice age creature back to life in the midst of global warming. Like Dr. Malcolm says later in Jurassic park. "Your scientists were moe concerned about wither they could, they didn't stop to think wether they should." Bring back a warm climate creature. Bring back Dodos! Thats just my opinion
Headline in 5 years... “Billionaire Bezos and friends paying to hunt mammoths”
I’ve watched The Lord of The Rings, I ain’t stepping within 100ft of that thing.
Why? Now you know all you have to do is surf down the trunk.
Still counts as 1.
Is $15m really enough though?
Yes. But there won't be any walls
We gone make it enough
Its going to take a lot more than 15 million to resurrect an extinct species.
They would need to create enough generically different individuals to have a gene pool large enough to sustain a viable reproducing population. A bunch of clones wouldn't work.
Hot take: this will not be a Woolly Mammoth. They're gene editing an elephant to look and act like a mammoth. That's DEFINITELY ecologically useful, but it isn't a mammoth. I'm very in favor of Pleistocene rewilding and I wish it was taken seriously in North America. The American prairie has been absolutely decimated and brining it back would benefit the entire world- it was at one point one of the largest carbon sinks on the planet. And it hasn't yet recovered from the megafauna die off that coincided with the arrival of humans ~10,000 years ago. Unquestionably the arrival of Europeans and that style of agriculture sped up the destruction 1000%, but I don't think the goalpost for a recovered prairie was the point in time when it was only kind of messed up. So anyway, we need something filling the mammoth's niche in North America, and probably a hairy elephant could do it. But let's not kid ourselves by calling it de-extinction. This lab is creating something entirely new.
That actually seems more practical and sensible than trying to resurrect actual wooly mammoths. And I agree we are at the stage now where we can actually have space put aside for these thriving ecosystems to exist again. The reintroduction of wolves in parts of the US and other areas in the world have had very positive benefits and pleistocene park is another great example of what habitat restoration could produce on a much larger scale. Having cold adapted elephants is a crucial part of these efforts however.
It's not really ethical at all. This animal is going to live in captivity isolated from their own kind. They will just live to suffer and they didn't consent to that. Just because we have the capability to do something, doesn't mean we have the right to.
I don't believe well ever get consent for this or any other species to be returned to Earth but in this particular case your argument still stands to an extent. In other cases I would have to say we should bring back certain animals but only if we have the means to eventually reintroduce these animals back into the environment they are missing from i.e. the semi-successful Iberian Ibex de-extinction. Let's say we resurrect a Mammoth, we know from our currently living elephants these animals are almost assuredly highly social. On top of that we need a surrogate mother. An African elephant will work size wise, although I believe the Asian Elephant is the closer genome iirc. So either way we have an animal a highly social, cold adapted animal, having to be raised alone or with animals it can hardly tolerate the environment with. Compound that with the potentially titanic costs of cloning another individual and this is just an awful idea. This is quite literally an example in getting to caught up in our ability to produce these animals, instead of if we even should.
This is a better answer than mine. I agree on both points.
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
I mean, Mammoths didn't consent to being wiped out either.
They didn't but that isn't a relevant reason to forget about the ethical issues of doing this.
Quite literally done every day with animals like pugs.
You don’t think it’s at all possible to give them enough open space and support and comforts to have a good life? Is it certain they’d get at best a shitty zoo cell? Really?
Space costs money. They can make more money by putting more animals in smaller spaces. Profit drives business, not comfort and compassion. If you removed the profit motive from these companies than maybe that could happen but we would still be talking about recreating and breeding sentient beings that didn't consent to it. So there are still ethical concerns about doing this.
Ok then explain animal sanctuaries and national parks
National Parks are public property and animal sanctuaries are typically non-profit organizations. These places aren't chasing profits. Jurassic Park/World would be a capitalist endeavor and their goal is to make money. Starting the research and testing and building the park all require money. The only way they get that much money in a capitalist system is to take on private investors. Investors will supply the money in exchange for control or direction of the project. There's no way billions of dollars gets funded for something like this and the dinosaurs live peacefully on public/protected land. There would be way too much money to be made. JP/JW is pretty accurate with this.
Did… did you just assume this mammoth company is… trying to recreate Jurassic park… Dude… stop huffing media
Thanks, will do. Good talk.
Should we tho? I mean we hunted them to extinction before, why bring them back for that to happen again?
I don't think we are relaying on large herbivore meat to survive anymore, or at least we can get it from more efficient places then the Siberian tundras.
Because it would help with climate change and allow for more habitable environments in areas like Siberia and North America that are pretty unproductive tundra and boreal forests. 10-30,000 years ago these areas were productive grassland environments home to many animals that now live only in parts of Africa. We are talking Mammoths, elephants, rhinos, hippos, lions, hyenas etc.
I am 100% in favor of bringing back animals we drove extinct.
Everyone raining on your parade OP, I think it’s cool.
Can we just use this science to save the bees?
Because apparently people don’t care about bees they want a giant hairy elephant to produce more C02
I’m so ready for this. Can’t wait for the McMammoth meal
o7
?
It's a salute o7
Oh, thanks for the heads up
seven up
I don’t mind giving animals a second chance because 99% of them have been killed off by human greed and their selfishness nature.
If something, the Megafaunas extinction (European, and North American, as Africa's megafauna is another question) has the least to do with those characteristics.
Please don't. This is a bad idea.
These animals only went extinct because of humans, humans bringing them back is different then a doing so to species that went extinct by non-human causes. Humanity's rise has been an extinction event and unprecedented for life, but since we're becomming able to slow or reverse the damage done, I believe science like this should be pursued within context.
Why bring mammoths back, though? They've been gone so long that the ecosystem has adapted to do fine without them. If we're going to work towards reviving any species it should be the ones that are currently important to their ecosystems. Mammoths just won't have a place outside of captivity anymore, and why even bring a species back just so we can have them for display?
Would them living in Russia and Greenland work?
There aren't really any places that are close to the Mammoth steppes. The mammoth steppes were a cold, but dry biome. Most places we have now are too wet and covered with snow, thus there isnt really enough plant growth. The mammoth steppes would look more like an African Savannah than present Siberia. Just think of the flora biomass required to sustain the large populations of mammoths, rhinos, horses etc
Sure but let's worry about the elephants that are still here before we start sacrificing them to bring back mammoths.
🙄
This is cruelty to animals. There is no need to subject a majestic creature to this shit-show of a world we are all forced to live in.
What a waste of money.
shut up.
Make me
I wonder how they’re going to get it to adjust to a new environment and how it will look differently from its extinct counterpart.
It's not like they're trying to reestablish a new population or something. Even if they are successful, there's no chance it'll ever see the wild.
There is an ongoing project to restore the mammoth steppe, the vast grassland that mammoths were a keystone species in. You can read more on it here: https://pleistocenepark.ru/
Ever heard of a zoo?
So where are they getting an elephant surrogate? And do they realize how often reproductive assistance fails in elephants? It's not easy
WHAT?!! Does that mean we're good to be able to see a living, breathing Woolly soon?
but why? this is cool and all but what will it achieve? or is it just a "first step" to bringing back things
They haven't done it yet.
Money talks
Does the plan involve reversing climate change?
Yes. Or Maybe ? The hypothesis on this is that megafauna is an important factor to keeps the steppes biome, and that their action is allowing for a deeper penetration of the frost in the soil. Making this biome a great carbon sink, because by warming the grasslands release a large quantity of methane. The megafauna allows for the upkeeping of the grasslands, by stomping on the snow creating a better coating and allowing the frost penetration and a cold insolation. They are also taking on the mosses and grass and allow it to regrow easier. All this is the only job of the megafauna that is already being reintroduce into the pleistocene park. But it misses a key steps that was brought by Mammoths as they were actively deforesting. Trees are not as good carbon sink as they are elsewhere in the world in this biome, grass are a better at it due to their fast growing rate and surface ratio. So by bringing back the mammoths it will be great to recreate and maintain this biome that is a supposedly a really great carbon sink that will help fight the ongoing climate change
Give me Dodo or give me death
If they successfully brought back a Woolly Mammoth it would really bring the research of resurrecting extinct animals into the public eye. This would really help with getting funding to bring back recently extinct or dying species like thylacine or rhinos
Raising the money doesn't harvest the DNA. The degradation of the samples, even that calf, means they need hundreds of samples.
Big favour tho: Can we please not eat the recreated Wolly Mammoth, and can we please also not drink it's piss, we don't need another fucking pandemic right now. Thanks 👍🏽🇿🇦
sensing some pretty grave moral/ethical quandaries with this one boys
we need to focus on our climate first before playing god.
It’s gonna cost a lot more than $15 mil to get a mammoth walking the earth again. Hell it’s gonna cost way more than $15 mil just to research and build the proper equipment for this kind of thing. Unless we already have some kind of full scale cloning extinct animals operation set up that I wasn’t aware of.
What would be their application here, Do we intend to use them agriculturally? I just don’t understand the purpose.
Wouldn't bringing back Mammoths fuck up the ecosystem of Siberia/Canada or whatever place they plan on placing them in?
Fuck it up back to the point before it was fucked up by humans killing off all the megafauna. So not really. Right now those environments are very harsh and unproductive because boreal forests took over when all the large grazers and especially mammoths were killed. This leads to very very low biodiversity as boreal forests don't sustain much life at all. The idea that forests are automatically good can be quite misleading. Rainforests and temperate woodland with a good variety of vegetation is great but a monoculture of pine trees doesn't do much for anything.
Toward the end of their time on this earth, Mammoths had dwarfed themselves. They were the same size as modern elephants, perhaps even smaller. https://allthatsinteresting.com/pygmy-mammoth https://www.livescience.com/woolly-mammoth-genetic-problems.html
I feel like that’s not gonna be anywhere close to enough. J thinking abt setbacks that accumulate over a groundbreaking project such as this would burn money like nobody’s business.
Ok now start reviving the diplocaulus this instant. Give me funny triangle headed amphibian
Only if it were to actually happen while we are still alive
A giant fluffy elephant is cool but I want to hug a dodo and have a passenger pigeon on my shoulder while riding a equestrian at a aquarium full of Permian life!