![]() But even he thinks that the more important goal should be preventing extinction rather than reversing it. ![]() Joseph Frederickson, a vertebrate paleontologist and director of the Weis Earth Science Museum in Menasha, Wis., was inspired as a child by the original Jurassic Park movie. "I think there is a lot of technological development that can be done we can learn a lot about how to edit genomes, and that could be really useful for endangered species today." "I can see some reasons to do the first steps where you are tinkering with cell lines and editing the genomes," Dalén says. we believe our work will restore this degraded ecosystem to a richer one, similar to the tundra that existed as recently as 10,000 years ago," the company says. "With the reintroduction of the woolly mammoth. They argue that returning mammoths - or at least hybrids that would fill the same ecological niche - to the Arctic could reverse that trend. After they disappeared, the accumulated snow, with its insulating properties, meant the permafrost began to warm, releasing greenhouse gases, Church and others contend. Mammoths once scraped away layers of snow so that cold air could reach the soil and maintain the permafrost. The largest mammoths stood more than 10 feet at the shoulder and are believed to have weighed as much as 15 tons. Some say reintroduced mammoths could help reverse climate changeĬhurch and others believe that resurrecting the mammoth would plug a hole in the ecosystem left by their decline about 10,000 years ago (although some isolated populations are thought to have remained in Siberia until about 1,700 B.C.). The resulting animal - known as a "mammophant" - would look, and presumably behave, much like a woolly mammoth. To be sure, what's being proposed is actually a hybrid created using a gene-editing tool known as CRISPR-Cas9 to splice bits of DNA recovered from frozen mammoth specimens into that of an Asian elephant, the mammoth's closest living relative. "As Colossal actively pursues the conservation and preservation of endangered species, we are identifying species that can be given a new set of tools from their extinct relatives to survive in new environments that desperately need them." "We are working towards bringing back species who left an ecological void as they went extinct," the company, Colossal, said in answer to questions emailed by NPR. Using recovered DNA to "genetically resurrect" an extinct species - the central idea behind the Jurassic Park films - may be moving closer to reality with the creation this week of a new company that aims to bring back woolly mammoths thousands of years after the last of the giants disappeared from the Arctic tundra.įlush with a $15 million infusion of funding, Harvard University genetics professor George Church, known for his pioneering work in genome sequencing and gene splicing, hopes the company can usher in an era when mammoths "walk the Arctic tundra again." He and other researchers also hope that a revived species can play a role in combating climate change. Leonello Calvetti/Stocktrek Images/Getty Images/Stocktrek Images An artist's impression of a woolly mammoth in a snow-covered environment.
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