Hi, it’s Katrina!
Did you know that scientists are working on bringing back extinct species?
The quagga is already back (in a way?), and the others??
You’ll have to wait and see!!
7.
THE QUAGGA
The quagga is an extinct zebra species that once inhabited South Africa.
According to record, in 1870, the last remaining wild quagga was shot, and the last captive
quagga died in 1883.
Hunting is primarily to blame for their extinction.
Since 1987, the Quagga Project has attempted to bring this species back from extinction.
According to DNA analysis, the Quagga was a subspecies of the Plains Zebra, rather than
a separate species.
Contrary to what’s on record, the organization contends that the quagga lived long past its
“official” extinction, due to the confusing former use of the term “quagga” in reference
to various species of zebra.
They do, however, agree that the quagga was eventually hunted out of existence.
The Quagga Project is attempting to restore the species, at least in an aesthetic way,
by retrieving the genes responsible for its unique striping through selective breeding.
Put simply, they hope to breed the Burchell’s zebra to visually resemble the quagga.
On January 20, 2005, the first quagga-like foal, Henry, was born.
He was considered to resemble a quagga due to his visible reduced striping.
In December 2013, the first fifth-generation foal was born.
Out of the 116 animals listed by the Quagga Project in March 2016, six bore a reduced
stripe pattern.
The organization ultimately hopes to breed 50 such zebras and relocate them to a protected
area within their former natural habitat.
6.
Woolly Mammoth
In a May 2015 interview with Smithsonian Magazine, DNA expert and biologist Beth Shapiro of the
University of California, Santa Cruz discussed the possibilities revolving around the de-extinction
of various species.
When asked what species she would most like to bring back to life, Shapiro explained that
while her answer to that question changes daily, the woolly mammoth is an “ideal candidate.”
She has another candidate that she thinks would be more fun to bring back, though, which
I will tell you about later.
Shapiro sees the mammoth as an animal that would encourage people to take an interest
in science and technology.
She also believes that the mammoth would have a “net positive impact on the environment.”
When the mammoth went extinct, its habitat changed dramatically.
George Church of Harvard University is the leading researcher working to bring back the
mammoth from extinction, and believes that doing so may help convert some of the Earth’s
Arctic tundra back to a grassland environment.
There are potential complications to resurrecting the woolly mammoth.
Bringing the animal back would require manipulating female Asian elephants in various ways, including
using their eggs, having them act as maternal hosts, and even having them raise the baby
mammoths as their own.
According to Shapiro, it’s important to know how to safely carry out these later steps
of the process before going past the primary stages of sequencing and manipulating genomes.
The last mammoth went extinct around 4,000 years ago.
Shapiro stated that creating some version of the animal, which would be an elephant
with mammoth-like traits, could realistically happen within a decade.
However, before you get your hopes up too high, a 100-percent mammoth, with the exact
same genes and behaviors as its ancestor, will never happen.
This is the case for pretty much any extinct species that scientists are working on bringing
back from extinction.
5.
PASSENGER PIGEON
The passenger pigeon, which went extinct around the year 1900, was a small, gray bird with
a pinkish-red breast.
It was once very common in the forests of North America.
Much like the woolly mammoth, scientists are well underway with research into bringing
back the passenger pigeon, and believe doing so is a matter of “when,” rather than
“if.”
The passenger pigeon population is estimated to have reached five billion by the beginning
of the 19th century.
Consequently, the bird played a major role in the shaping of its environment.
Between the high number of birds and their prevalent and flammable droppings, they were
healthy natural disturbances in the forms of forest fires and the destruction of trees.
When the passenger pigeon went extinct, the white oak lost its primary method of seed
dispersal via the bird’s droppings, and the aforementioned “healthy natural disturbances”
in the forms of tree destruction and occasional fires ceased.
Scientists believe that bringing the passenger pigeon back will be beneficial to the forests
it once inhabited, which have not been the same since the species vanished.
Ecologist Ben Novak is the lead researcher for the passenger pigeon project at Revive
& Restore, a San Francisco-based foundation dedicated to genetically rescuing endangered
and extinct species.
He wants to use the bird’s closest living relative, the band-tailed pigeon, to resurrect
the passenger pigeon.
Novak explained in a 2016 interview with Science Magazine that the public and scientific community
most likely harbor differing opinions regarding what constitutes the true de-extinction of
a species.
He believes that an ecosystem’s lost function can potentially be restored by “genetically
coaxing” an animal to behave like its extinct relatives.
However, he also pointed out in his own words: “I don’t think anyone in the world is
really going to call it de-extinction unless the bird looks right.”
Before the passenger pigeon is brought back on any level, scientists must figure out how
many genes need to be swapped with the band-tailed pigeon to constitute success - an admittedly
arbitrary process.
After that, they’ll be faced with the tasks of getting a hybrid cell to grow within a
surrogate, bringing the hybrid to term, and hoping that despite being raised by a modern
relative, it behaves like the extinct species.
Novak hopes to successfully breed the first generation of resurrected passenger pigeons
by 2025 so remember that and keep an eye out!!
4.
AUROCHS
All modern cattle share a live ancestor called the aurochs, the last of which died in 1627
in what’s considered modern-day Poland.
The animal’s extinction was caused primarily by agriculture and domestication.
Scientists and historians alike have little to go on when it comes to describing what
the aurochs looked or behaved like during its existence.
They rely primarily upon cave paintings, descriptions within historical records, and some fossil
remains.
Roman Emperor Julius Caesar praised aurochs, stating that their “strength and speed are
extraordinary.”
Exact descriptions of the animal are lacking, despite its once-widespread presence throughout
numerous regions.
It’s likely that the animal varied across different environments when it came to size,
behavior, and general temperament.
Some scientists believe that the aurochs can be brought back to life through a process
known as back-breeding.
This would be accomplished by breeding its descendants in accordance with offspring that
demonstrate the most aurochs-like traits.
Since 2009, European teams have been selectively breeding cattle that carry some aurochs DNA.
It’s difficult to say what the future holds for the resurrection of aurochs, due partially
to conflicting definitions of what would constitute an “authentic” specimen.
In 2015, the first full aurochs genome was sequenced by Stephen Parks and his colleagues.
Much work still needs to be done to fully determine the genetic variability of the extinct
species.
In an October 2017 article for The Conversation, researcher and author Mihnea Tanasescu stated:
“It is unlikely that an organisation will be able to impose a standard for what, in
the future, will count as an Auroch.”
What do you think?
Let me know in the comments below!!
3.
THE HEATH HEN
The heath hen was a species of prairie chicken that was once found across much of the East
Coast of the U.S., and which went extinct in 1932.
In 2014, at the urging - and financial backing - of residents of Martha’s Vineyard, the
heath hen became one of the de-extinction projects of the San-Francisco based foundation
Revive & Restore.
Although hunting was to blame for the eradication of the heath hen, the sand plains it once
inhabited still exist, and are a potential habitat for the hypothetical resurrected species
to return to.
Revive & Restore founder Stewart Brand and his team of scientists claimed that they may
be close to culturing germ cells that would be altered to carry heath hen DNA.
These germ cells, which would develop into sperm or eggs, would be transferred to the
embryo of a greater prairie chicken - the modern species of bird that most closely resembles
the heath hen.
Brand referred to the heath hen as a possible “gateway bird” for “genetically rescuing
a wide variety of endangered and possibly extinct birds.”
He believes that the resurrection of the heath hen could even lead to the comeback of the
dodo and the passenger pigeon.
Harvard geneticist George Church ranks the heath hen as on par with the woolly mammoth
in terms of progress along the de-extinction process.
This is good news!
In Church’s own words: “I think they’re both moving faster than we expected they would.”
2.
DODO BIRD
During her May 2015 interview with Smithsonian Magazine, Beth Shapiro was asked what extinct
species she thinks would be the most fun to resurrect.
Her answer was the dodo bird.
Why?
Well, for one, it’s silly looking, with juvenile characteristics.
If resurrected, the flightless bird could live in its protected native habitat on the
island of Mauritius, which is located east of Madagascar.
This would offer people the opportunity to observe the dodo in its natural environment.
Dodo birds went extinct during the 1600’s, shortly after humans discovered Mauritius.
Dutch and Portuguese explorers introduced animals to the island that ate the dodo’s
eggs, such as dogs, rats, pigs, cats, and monkeys.
Additionally, it is believed humans hunted the bird for food.
Eventually, the dodo was hunted out of existence.
Resurrecting the dodo became a realistic vision in 2007, when a complete and well-preserved
skeleton of one was discovered.
Until then, most dodo remains were incomplete and were discovered in swamps, which had a
corrosive effect on them.
There are different proposed methods of bringing back extinct animals.
In the case of the dodo, the process would possibly start by cloning some of its closest
relatives.
In fact, one of the reasons scientists believe the dodo can be brought back to life is because
it has so many close living relatives such as the Nicobar Pigeon, a smaller flying bird
from the southern Pacific..
It’s theoretically possible to genetically engineer a living relative with DNA from the
extinct species to give birth to a “model animal,” or the modern-day rendition of
the extinct dodo.
We’ll see what happens!
1.
DINOSAURS
So how close are we to resurrecting dinosaurs??
Don’t let science fiction movies like Jurassic Park fool you - as neat and terrifying as
it would be to bring dinosaurs back to life, it’s not going to happen.
Beth Shapiro, the same biologist and DNA expert who spoke about resurrecting mammoths and
the dodo bird, explained that it’s impossible to bring any dinosaur species back to life.
There’s a simple reason for this: the oldest DNA ever found by modern technology is around
one million years old, and dinosaurs went extinct around 66 million years ago.
In a June 2018 article for The Conversation, authors Darren Griffin, a Professor of Genetics
at the University of Kent, and Rebecca O’Connor, a postdoctoral research associate from the
same university, referred to Jurassic Park’s concept of extracting the DNA of extinct animals
from the blood of dinosaur-age mosquitoes as “an outstanding piece of fiction.”
Although prehistoric mosquitoes containing dinosaur blood have been found, any DNA within
the blood degraded long ago.
Recently, scientists figured out the overall genomic structure of dinosaurs.
The way genes are arranged on chromosomes for each species is known as its genomic structure.
However, this recent development in research does not bring the scientific community any
closer to bringing dinosaurs back to life.
Even if dinosaur DNA could be extracted, Griffin and O’Connor explained, it would be chopped
up into millions of tiny pieces, and the experts would not know how to organize them.
The authors likened the process to “solving the world’s hardest jigsaw puzzle, with
no idea what the picture looks like or whether there are any missing pieces.”
They also pointed out that having a DNA sequence is merely the beginning to recreating an animal
-but since scientists are nowhere near acquiring dino DNA to begin with, I’d recommend not
getting your hopes up about a real-life Jurassic Park.
An ice age park though, maybe!!
Would you like to learn more about extinct animals that scientists are trying to resurrect?
Let me know if you want a part 2!
There’s more where that came from!
Remember to subscribe so you don’t miss out on the latest videos, and I’ll see you
next time!