The last tiger to die in a zoo was in 1936. A genetic engineering company that last year announced plans to put thousands of woolly mammoths back on the Siberia steppe has added the lost wolf to its de- extinction docket.
Colossal is a company that wants to bring back species wiped off the face of the planet by climate change and humankind. The vaquita is one of many large mammals that are on the verge of extinction.
When the Great Pyramids were being built in Egypt, the last woolly mammoth was still alive. The extinction of the thylacine is more recent than before. Humans started hunting these striped marsupials once they were seen as a threat to settlers' livestock, which they by and large weren't.
The tiger wasn't related to big cats. It didn't look like a canid, but it was much like a dog. When the thylacine went extinct, it was the largest animal in the world.
Thanks to the amount of material they left behind, the complete genomes of both the thylacines and the mammoths are now available.
Colossal wants to bring a mammoth calf to bear within five years, thanks to the use of cutting edge technology. The full-throated plan for the return of thethylacine can be found here.
A philanthropic gift of $5 million was made earlier this year to the University of Melbourne'sTIGRR Lab, which is working on the resurrection of theThylacine. Colossal's contribution to the project is more than that, but no more details were offered.
The Winklevoss twins (made famous by their roles in the early days of Facebook, dramatized in The Social Network), the Hemsworth brothers, and ParisHilton are some of Colossal's investors.
The front-of-mind question is how a company that is still working on a huge project can balance the resurgence of the thylacine with it. It's no small feat to de- extinquish a species. That's the reason it hasn't been done. It is even more difficult to do so ethically and in a way that doesn't endanger the health of the new animals.
The current project puts the return of extinct species before the health of existing species. A lot of Australia's animals are close to extinction now, and could theoretically be protected with the kind of money being thrown around here. The return of these extinct species would improve the health of the habitats.
What would be brought back wouldn't be a thylacine. Colossal began its recent announcement with "starting the de-extinction of theThylacine" but later referred to the creation of a proxy species of the Thylacine.
The fat-tailed dunnart, a marsupial about the size of a mouse, would be the ideal animal to produce because there are no tigers left.
The dunnart is a close relative of the thylacine, but it is not as large as a dog. There is no way to know how the animal behaved in its native environment after it went extinct.
The animal's hallmark sound, described as a double-yip by those rarified few who had a chance to hear it, is a near-impossible thing to duplicate. If we were to get that far, it would be hard to bring back the behavioral characteristics of extinct animals.
The animal produced from this project will not be a good match. The true thylacine isn't around anymore.
The footage of a tiger brings an extinct species back to life.
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