May 16, 2013
"12 Animals We Wish We Could De-Extinct."
"The science is complicated... and so are the ethics involved. But who can resist dreaming up a de-extinction 'wish list'? With more species nearing the extinction danger zone every day, there's no shortage of candidates, but some are more scientifically suited for resurrection than others. And even if we could bring a species back, should we? We looked to scientists to explain who they'd like to bring back, and which are best left in the past."
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53 comments:
I dunno about that list. Bad enough to have bears and mountain lions show up on your deck if you live in Colorado. A T. Rex would really screw things up.
And I'd bet that the Sierra Club would insist on stricter standards for decks if a bunch of them collapsed under the weight of a T. Rex.
And Neaderthals are not extinct! They live in Brussels and work for the EU.
I'll go with the passenger pigeon and that's it.
I like how all the extinct animals are chopped in as photo bombs. They all scream Chip Ahoy!!!
Don’t dodos, giant ground sloths, Neanderthals and giant rodents remain plentiful to roam free in the Halls of Congress?
How about bringing back the pro-America liberal.
I recommend reading the Nat'l Geographic article rather than the dopey Mother Jones one.
I think we should focus on some birds first: Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Caroline Parakeet, Eskimo Curlews, etc.
Icepick said...
How about bringing back the pro-America liberal.
I don't know. The gene pool is pretty small to try that. Let's start easier.
The Scoop Jackson Democrat first?
Get that, and you can just send him to Hahvad, and get a Patriotic Liberal
Dodos win. There were still some on Midway Island on June 4, 1942, so we could call them a Good Luck. I believe the could not fly.
It's not certain if the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker actually is extinct. There have been a few disputed sightings in recent years.
Peter
While we're mining this vein, could we please get rid of the mosquitoes? And deer ticks, and maybe carpenter ants? Please?
Carolina Parakeet and Ivory Billed Woodpecker. These can been seen in a single exhibit at the Charleston SC Museum along with a Passenger Pidgeon.
I'd go with Neanderthals, the Moa, the passenger pigeon, the Mammoth, Tasmanian Tiger, and see how bringing them back worked out.
The article said dinosaurs were too far back...but if it was possible, I would go with the most successful ones, the hadrosaurs. (duckbills) Which, if theory is right, thrived on the sort of aquatic weeds such as water hyacinth, that we don't presently have a good herbivore for.
Yes, kids might love cool predators, but if we bring stuff back, it would be nice to see critters that would work with the ecology and improve it, while having uses if harvested, leaving us the predators.
Neanderthals, obviously not for harvesting, but for analysis to see what differences existed in physiology and mental processes - to better understand homo sapiens.
To those that worry how a species that might be inferior would fare and it would be wrong to bring them back - I say with affirmative action, welfare, Obamaphones, free housing and other stuff - no reason they cannot flourish and breed if homo sapiens are responsible for providing their ancestors every need.
Here's something I can never get a straight answer on: what species have gone extinct recently.
During the whole of my childhood I was taught, in school, that species were going extinct every hour. As I got older I wondered: ok, which ones? What went extinct last year? Why don't those species top the de-extinction list?
Do they not exist at all?
Why bring BACK the Neanderthals when we have them in our very midst.
I give you Carrottop as an example as we know the Neanderthals were prone to being red headed!
Actually....the giant rodent or aurochs would be useful as food/domestic animals, especially the giant capybara. We would need stouter fencing though.
I hear Ivy League ROTC graduates are making a comeback.
They need to take samples of all the endangered species, and then get rid of the expensive eco laws.
I'd bring back the common American bedbug.
Oh ... wait. Michael Bloomberg already did.
How about bringing back small pox?
What? Neither sea monsters or dragons?
I wanna de-extinct the cat I had when I was growing up. She was cool
The group pic was not something that made me care about anything else in the article.
Nonpartisan IRS employees.
Check out the golden-mantled tree kangaroo, one of many new species found within a Tarzan-style escarpment in New Guinea by explorers in 2005.
My recollection is that the story said these Foja Mountains are so utterly remote that when the explorers entered the area birds actually landed on their shoulders. They had no fear of humans. No one had journeyed to this realm prior to 1979, according to Wiki.
The scientists also discovered a rat, the Mallomys giant rat, which is five times the size of city rats. It's believed the only other place this creature dwells is in Washington, D.C.
If things went extinct before man, what is the right number of things we should let go extinct now?
What would the Passenger Pigeon eat? All the Chestnut trees are dead.
The giant rat revealed.
Dude!
This is what Holmes was after.
I'd love to see a real, flying, pterodactyl. I think that would be awesome.
That, and Godzilla. Not that I have anything against Tokyo, I'd just want to see it exhale that nuclear fire breath.
Huh? Godzilla not real? Well, darn.
How about a toad the size of a beachball?
Or a bunny that weighed upwards of 50 pounds?
Or the 8 foot tall 550 pound Demon Duck of Doom!!
Oops. It was Gooney birds at Midway Island. That would make a great Commenter name: Gooneybird.
The only one I would care about is the Neanderthal. It would be very interesting to learn about a different kind of human being, to communicate and understand how he/she thinks, feels, behaves, etc.
But it would raise profound moral problems. Neanderthals were human, so this would be like cloning a human being. Joking aside (would a Neanderthal join the NRA or OWS?), we just shouldn't go down that road.
I would bring back the Irish Elk. On a school field trip to the Peabody Museum in New Haven,* I recall being taken aback by its enormous antlers. They scarcely looked real, but a guide assured us that they were. In fact, it was once widely believed that the antlers evolved to such a huge size that they led to the animal's extinction, though that probably wasn't the case. Given that the Irish Elk has been extinct for less than 8,000 years, recovering useful DNA may still be possible.
* = one of the four attractions that practically everyone who attended school in Connecticut visited on a field trip, along with Mystic Seaport, the Wadsworth Athanaeum, and Old Sturbridge Village (the last of these being just over the Massachusetts line).
Peter
If we acknowledge that there are species best left in the past, it seems it would follow that there are some present-day ones that we can spare. Let's have that list.
I'd be very wary of resurrecting the passenger pigeon. In their heyday they traveled in flocks millions strong. Tree limbs would break when they roosted.
The amazing thing is they ever became extinct, but I guess they were damned tasty.
As I understand it, the clearing of forests for agriculture doomed the passenger pigeon. Hunting was a much smaller factor. For some reason, the birds were able to breed only when they were in huge flocks, and without extensive forest cover the huge flocks could not exist.
Peter
Griffins would be cool, and Fairies before they got all uppity.
De-extinct Ladies and Gentlemen.
I'd bring back the best tasting species first. In accordance with this principle I'd bring back the saber toothed tiger last.
Obviously the folks who cast the Rodent Of Unusual Size in The Princess Bride weren't thinking on a sufficiently grand scale. A rodent ten feet long and weighing a ton is ... something. Something I think I'd quite like to see alive again, but preferably a continent or two away. Uruguay would be fine. Have at it.
If you "reverse-engineer" an auroch, have you got an actual auroch? I wouldn't think so.
Why no mention of mastodons or woolly mammoths? Apart from the obvious recently-extinct species like the passenger pigeon, they're the likeliest prospects, because we have good (frozen, not rotted) tissue samples, and closely-related living species (elephants) to work with.
I'd bring back the American Chestnut and the dodo.
I also wonder why no one brought up the bluebuck, or as I seem to recall Stephen Jay Gould calling it, in Afrikaans, the Blaauwbock. That is certainly misspelled, because I'm doing this from memory; don't take my word for it. But it's a South African antelope species that became extinct ca. 1800. There are four, um, taxidermy-fied specimens in existence, and closely related living species.
The closeted homosexual.
Our wise ancestors worked very hard to get rid of the Neaderthals, and some of us are considering bringing them back???
I say, "NO NEADERTHALS!"
Neanderthals were human, so this would be like cloning a human being. - The Godfather
The designation "human" denotes a species, like "zebra" or "blue whale." Thus only Homo Sapiens is human. Accordingly, Neanderthals are not human. They are Neanderthals.
As a result, they would have no human rights. If we bring them back, we would be able to make them our pets. Or food. Democrats would be able to enslave them.
NO NEANDERTHALS!
Palladian:
There is a stand of about 600 American chestnut trees on the ridge at Chimney Corners resort in Benzie County, Michigan. It's a little bit of a hike to get up there, but they are truly magnificent trees and worth the effort to see.
"Unpublished research paper suggests that humans have inherited from neanderthals а gene cluster, linked to advanced mathematics skills, information processing, logic, analytical intelligence, concentration skills, obsession–compulsion disorder and Asperger’s syndrome. However,Neanderthals lacked genes linked to successful socialization and management skills. They could count perfectly well, but they couldn’t deal with groups."
from:
"Genes, known to be linked to modern human intelligence, found in neanderthals", (Nature.com)
March 29, 2012
Paleoanthropology
http://anthropologyreviews.com/?p=249
Maybe that explains why the Neanderthals were able to keep modern humans out of Europe for so long (i.e. initially modern humans did not have the Neanderthals' math/logic gene which put them at a disadvantage wrt the Neanderthals).
Does this mean that people without this Neanderthal math/logic gene are at a disadvantage wrt math and logic?
How about the hobbits from Indonesia, aka Homo Floresiensis?
J F K Democrats.
... like JFK himself, or Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Jurassic Park, bitches.
Just find some DNA.
There are a lot of large predators on that list. Which is not surprising, as the recently-extinct ones may well have been killed off by our ancestors.
But if you brought them back the only place to keep them would be in zoos, as wild habitat for such creatures just doesn't exist anymore.
Besides, why not think small? Didn't we just make make the smallpox virus (variola) extinct (or practically so)? What about the 1918 "Spanish flu" bug? There's lots of really small critters we could bring back.
But, really, why fool around with recently extinct organisms, when we can create new ones?
All the Chestnut trees are dead.
The American Chestnut isn't extinct, it's just hobbled by edemic diseases which means that no stands ever reach adult height. They still hobble along in dwarf format, enough to keep the genus going, but not enough to get us the old, golden forests of yore.
Thus only Homo Sapiens is human.
The entire "Homo" genus is human (that's what the name means, basically). We're just the only surviving species in it.
Nothing like bad ideas to get the juices flowing. Yes, we NEED more mankillers around here to help depopulate the overpopulated parts.
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