0
Bringing back the woolly mammoth and other extinct creatures may be impossible
Capturing enough of an extinct rat's genome to recreate it turned out to be harder than scientists thought
9 MAR 2022
An extinct rat that once lived on an island in the Indian Ocean may have put the kibosh on scientists’ dreams of resurrecting more famous extinct animals like the woolly mammoth. The Christmas Island rat disappeared just over 100 years ago, but researchers now say even its detailed genome isn’t complete enough to bring it back to life.
The work “shows both how wonderfully close—and yet—how devastatingly far” scientists are from being able to bring back extinct species by genetically transforming a close relative in what’s called “de-extinction,” says Douglas McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved with the study.
https://www.science.org/content/arti...-be-impossible
Bookmarks