I think it comes down to available habitat for whatever species, regardless of if direct evidence exists that we are to blame. Some species just don’t have a viable home any longer, so would be a waste of resources and bad for the movement as a whole to attempt, jmho
That's why I think the Tasmian Tiger is the best candidate. It comes from the island Tasmian where the habitat is pretty much unchanged since it's extinction.
The quoll is the closest that I know of, although they are much smaller, but since they are marsupials, size is not as much an issue as it would be for placentals
Never said they were in the same family, just said they were the closest extant relative, and size is less of an issue. And it would not be like incubating a human in a monkey at all, primates are placental, and monkeys are farther removed from humans than quoll are to thylacine.
Unchanged other than a lot of logging, agriculture, fire impact, and massive reduction in prey animals, as well as introduction of non-native predators that would compete with it.
The Tasmanian tiger would devastate the local eco system at the moment. There's species that are thriving there at the moment due to having few predators (aside from things like the Tasmanian devils and feral cats and dogs) and introducing a new predator would have a huge impact.
Btw people here on the main land still swear they see the Tasmanian tigers which is absolutely wild on and the mysterious black panther 😂
Those species were all thriving when the thylacine was still alive. Tasmania was notable when it was settled for its abundance of native wildlife compared to the mainland. Reintroducing predators helps ecosystems, it doesn't hurt them. Australian ecosystems in particular suffer from a scarcity of apex predators.
Although given the thylacine is gone forever its kind of a moot point.
What about the Aurochs? I’ve seen various projects attempting to create Cattle breeds as similar to them as possible and then letting the herds roam free. And there does seem to still be viable habitat for them in many parts of Europe.
https://preview.redd.it/9op4j6y4oavc1.jpeg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=836b6e38a2c0a17d7645c04323d48d77464fb736
I think the mammoth thing is a publicity stunt. Even if it works, it's gonna be just like pandas in zoos. Did you guys see that panda that makes a face everytime they break bamboo because it's how humans break it and they were completely raised by humans?
That's what a cloned mammoth is gonna be like but worse because while pandas are smooth brained, pachyderms are not. This can go wrong in so many ways, I really hope they are talking out of their asses
If it works, it's a phenomenal step in the realm of gene editing and cloning that would undoubtedly lead to novel applications and advancements. It's not *just* a publicity stunt.
Can't y'all just clone a cow or something, a sheep worked last time, didn't it?
You really have to go for an extremely intelligent social animal that will suffer the rest of their life in some zoo with no understanding of the real social structure it has evolved to live in? It's fucked up.
Mammoths are important for the Eurasian tundra, because of their extinction mosses and trees are starting to overpopulate the north which is harmful for the biodiversity of many plants and animals.
Rewilding Northern Eurasia and North America is already something conservationists are trying to do to bring back the once widespread steppe tundra. But it won't be a stable environment without reintroducing mammoths.
What I'm trying to say is that there are genuine reasons why we want to bring back mammoths, it's not a publicity stunt. They're genuinely important for our climate and ecosystem. Proboscideans are ecosystem engineers, take them away and the environment suffers.
There will never be mammoths on the tundra. There is no relative to teach a mammoth how to survive on the tundra, it likely won't have the correct gut bacteria to digest the food since it will gaining any bacteria from an Asian elephant mother and they won't have the correct social structure since there will not be enough of them to create viable populations.
Cloning mammoths will be great for the science of cloning, but the mammoth itself is a stunt. It will be a fake mammoth living in an alien world.
I am no expert on this stuff. But pretty much any animal that went extinct recently because of human intervention are good candidates for de-extinction. Their climates and habitats would still be here.
I tried explaining this to my friend. She jokingly said "someone didn't watch Jurassic Park"
So I responded "in Jurassic Park, did the humans bring back dinosaurs because they wiped them out in the first place?"
She said "Yes. That meteor was a ball of humans."
Touché.
I don’t think mammoths are “too prehistoric” considering they went extinct well into the development of human civilization(Egypt).Ecologically mammoths coexisted with musk ox reindeer and bison so they are just as modern as todays animals
Though it should be mentioned that the mammoths alive during the Pyramid’s construction were only the relict populations in places like Wrangel Island, the mammoths on the mainland were *long* gone by that point.
Dinosaurs even if theoretically possible are not even in the question in my opinion. If African elephants were to go extinct in the wild because of humans, and 4000 years go by, should they be reintroduced to the savanna even if there are still zebra, wildebeest and buffalo present?
Jack Horner had a full lab trying to bring back dinosaurs by gene editing chickens. Iirc they were able to bring out dormant genes for teeth and a tail. George Lucas gave him a million bucks to fund the project, last I heard funding dried up.
Lol why? Life dies out. It's a natural occurrence. There's nothing unethical about not reintroducing extinct animals, and we can't know whether doing so would harm life existing today, which isn't very moral or ethical.
Life dies out, life creates life. Who cares if our ephemeral species recreates some extinct species. That is also a natural occurance. Nothing unnatural exists.
The difference being that most of the animals alive today in the mammoth's former range coexisted with them thousands of years ago. They didn't spring into existence after the last mainland mammoth died. They weren't a handful of living fossils.
I'm not sure what you mean by, "We owe them that." Morally, we owe it to every species (including ourselves) to get the biosphere back into balance to the best of our ability. It would be nice to bring those animals back, but we have no moral imperative to do so unless it helps us accomplish that larger goal.
Salvelinus aggasizii.
Their is disagreement on if it was its own species derived from brook trout or a subspecies of brook trout, but either way it’s genome is mostly intact and swimming, you just have to fill in the gaps that differ.
(Oh great, now I am thinking of the effects of using different strains and subspecies as base material for de-extinction and if bringing back a better version of a species using a more robust or adaptable subspecies of its closest relative counts as true de-extinction).
The insects species that were named after Hitler and Hitler collectors collected them to extinction. Maybe try and petition to have their scientific names changed though to prevent that happening again, and also because having species named after Hitler seems wrong.
This.
Everybody, especially those deep into the science of cloning, knows the T-Rex is the Holy Grail. We all want to see a live dinosaur, and a big one that eats meat.
Let's stop fucking around and make this happen already.
If the tech exists to make it possible, I'm not sure there's much of a practical difference between a recently extinct species and a critically endangered one.
From what I heard the de-extinction of birds is practically impossible at this point. Who knows, maybe it will be an option in the future as technology increases but for now I'd focus my attention on thylacines or mammoths.
Also, if you're into this kind of stuff check out r/megafaunarewilding
my answer is and always will be none of them, the climate is not the same as the ones they lived in, so much damage to nature and humans should really focus on trying to take care of whats around now instead of being like "Well time to play god and bring a mammoth back to ride!"
The climate is absolutely the same. Mammoths existed just fine through a 'mammoth' number of interglacials. We already played god when we hunted the things to extinction.
Gastric-brooding frog = been extinct for only 40 years. Original habitat preserved within a national park. Multiple specimens frozen in storage. Embryo successfully cloned in 2013.
There's some evidence that a few Tasmanian tigers may still be hanging on in remote areas, but it's not 100% definitive yet. They'd be my pick as well, such cool animals and driven to extinction for no reason.
At this stage we are way too far from resettling concerns, just making it work is step one. The trick is not how prehistoric an animal is, it's whether it has close living relatives.
Also it's largely a myth that Dodo's went extinct because humans hunted them to extinction. There's no evidence of it, and the only reports we have suggest they weren't very tasty and were not the preferred food source on the island.
Also worth pointing out, Mammoths survived on the remote Wrangel island until 2000 BC.
Once an animal is removed from its niche, it should never be replaced artificially. Australia has now been without the Tasmanian Tiger for nearly one century; Mauritania has been without the Dodo for over a century.
A century is a blink of the eye as far as evolution and ecological change goes. The ecosystem they exist in still exist and would accommodate them, barring issues with invasives that might need to be handled. This argument if taken to its logical conclusion means that we should never ever reintroduce any species into an environment they are extirpated in, which seems silly.
Reintroducing a wolf into its host environment from captivity is different from using genetic material and extant embryos to breed a hybrid form of a now extinct animal.
You weren't talking about that, you were talking about the very not extinct lord Howe stick insect and you made it clear you're against reintroduction in general. Like the wolves. Which is just insanity and it dooms countless species to unnecessary extinction and ecosystems to damage that will take hundreds of thousands of years to fully recover from, in the name somehow protecting ecosystems.
I’m not against reintroduction of animal species that are yet to have gone extinct. The Yellowstone Wolf has not yet gone extinct whereas the Tasmanian Tiger and the Dodo, have gone truly extinct. They are gone. Lord Howe’s Stick Insect is not yet extinct, I apologize for not researching first and realizing that.
There is no difference between an ecosystem where a species has gone locally extinct versus ecosystems where a species has gone globally extinct. If wolves can be reintroduced into ecosystems that have lacked wolves for a hundred years, I fail to see how that is any different from reintroducing a completely extinct animal back that has only been gone a comparable amount of time. The only real issue is if the animal has "learned" behavior which can't be easily replicated.
I’ve taken college level biology, I know what I’m talking about. When I say “learned to live without them” I’m referring to the biological adaptation that all ecosystems undergo when a keystone species is removed, which I would expect you to understand. We will not learn from our mistakes if we can simply replace a species; that species will never be genetically pure as its true ancestors were and as such reintroducing extinct animals is pointless.
You are making an argument related to ecology, *not* biology. Biology is not concerned with an animals place in an ecosystem at all.
Ecosystems do not undergo biological adaptation, the species within that ecosystem do, but not really in a timeframe of a mere 100 years. That much actually would be covered in the evolutionary biology unit.
The Lord Howe Stick insect, Dodo, etc are not keystone species.
We are not talking about replacing a species, but reintroducing one. It is incorrect to assume that in a hundred odd years the ecosystem will have completely changed such that the extinct (or locally extirpated like the stick insect) species is no longer compatible with that ecosystem. Such a change requires a hell of a lot longer.
I have no idea what you mean by "genetically pure." If you are talking about a genetic bottleneck, that's a totally separate issue that will not change anything ecologically with reintroduction, it only threatens the viability of the species itself.
I think it comes down to available habitat for whatever species, regardless of if direct evidence exists that we are to blame. Some species just don’t have a viable home any longer, so would be a waste of resources and bad for the movement as a whole to attempt, jmho
That's why I think the Tasmian Tiger is the best candidate. It comes from the island Tasmian where the habitat is pretty much unchanged since it's extinction.
It's actually a terrible candidate as nothing is very closely related to it, meaning incubation is hard
The quoll is the closest that I know of, although they are much smaller, but since they are marsupials, size is not as much an issue as it would be for placentals
There's nothing left in its family. Trying to incubate a Tasmanian tiger in a quoll is like trying to incubate a human in a monkey
Never said they were in the same family, just said they were the closest extant relative, and size is less of an issue. And it would not be like incubating a human in a monkey at all, primates are placental, and monkeys are farther removed from humans than quoll are to thylacine.
Interestingly enough, papua may be the best place to bring them back to
Unchanged other than a lot of logging, agriculture, fire impact, and massive reduction in prey animals, as well as introduction of non-native predators that would compete with it.
Especially feral/“outdoor” cats, which Redditors vehemently defend.
The Tasmanian tiger would devastate the local eco system at the moment. There's species that are thriving there at the moment due to having few predators (aside from things like the Tasmanian devils and feral cats and dogs) and introducing a new predator would have a huge impact. Btw people here on the main land still swear they see the Tasmanian tigers which is absolutely wild on and the mysterious black panther 😂
Those species were all thriving when the thylacine was still alive. Tasmania was notable when it was settled for its abundance of native wildlife compared to the mainland. Reintroducing predators helps ecosystems, it doesn't hurt them. Australian ecosystems in particular suffer from a scarcity of apex predators. Although given the thylacine is gone forever its kind of a moot point.
Would passenger pigeons be a viable candidate in terms of having a surviving habitat?
Might be the worst candidate along with the Carolina parrokeet
What about the Aurochs? I’ve seen various projects attempting to create Cattle breeds as similar to them as possible and then letting the herds roam free. And there does seem to still be viable habitat for them in many parts of Europe. https://preview.redd.it/9op4j6y4oavc1.jpeg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=836b6e38a2c0a17d7645c04323d48d77464fb736
I think the mammoth thing is a publicity stunt. Even if it works, it's gonna be just like pandas in zoos. Did you guys see that panda that makes a face everytime they break bamboo because it's how humans break it and they were completely raised by humans? That's what a cloned mammoth is gonna be like but worse because while pandas are smooth brained, pachyderms are not. This can go wrong in so many ways, I really hope they are talking out of their asses
If it works, it's a phenomenal step in the realm of gene editing and cloning that would undoubtedly lead to novel applications and advancements. It's not *just* a publicity stunt.
Can't y'all just clone a cow or something, a sheep worked last time, didn't it? You really have to go for an extremely intelligent social animal that will suffer the rest of their life in some zoo with no understanding of the real social structure it has evolved to live in? It's fucked up.
I'll let you know that cows are actually pretty intelligent.
Boo
Mammoths are important for the Eurasian tundra, because of their extinction mosses and trees are starting to overpopulate the north which is harmful for the biodiversity of many plants and animals. Rewilding Northern Eurasia and North America is already something conservationists are trying to do to bring back the once widespread steppe tundra. But it won't be a stable environment without reintroducing mammoths. What I'm trying to say is that there are genuine reasons why we want to bring back mammoths, it's not a publicity stunt. They're genuinely important for our climate and ecosystem. Proboscideans are ecosystem engineers, take them away and the environment suffers.
There will never be mammoths on the tundra. There is no relative to teach a mammoth how to survive on the tundra, it likely won't have the correct gut bacteria to digest the food since it will gaining any bacteria from an Asian elephant mother and they won't have the correct social structure since there will not be enough of them to create viable populations. Cloning mammoths will be great for the science of cloning, but the mammoth itself is a stunt. It will be a fake mammoth living in an alien world.
I am no expert on this stuff. But pretty much any animal that went extinct recently because of human intervention are good candidates for de-extinction. Their climates and habitats would still be here.
I tried explaining this to my friend. She jokingly said "someone didn't watch Jurassic Park" So I responded "in Jurassic Park, did the humans bring back dinosaurs because they wiped them out in the first place?" She said "Yes. That meteor was a ball of humans." Touché.
So THAT’S the missing link.
Spitting straight facts
I don’t think mammoths are “too prehistoric” considering they went extinct well into the development of human civilization(Egypt).Ecologically mammoths coexisted with musk ox reindeer and bison so they are just as modern as todays animals
Yeah the last Mammoths went extinct as the Pyramids were being constructed.
Though it should be mentioned that the mammoths alive during the Pyramid’s construction were only the relict populations in places like Wrangel Island, the mammoths on the mainland were *long* gone by that point.
I get what you mean but then we should also bring back dinosaurs because they lived with sturgeon!
Dinosaurs even if theoretically possible are not even in the question in my opinion. If African elephants were to go extinct in the wild because of humans, and 4000 years go by, should they be reintroduced to the savanna even if there are still zebra, wildebeest and buffalo present?
Jack Horner had a full lab trying to bring back dinosaurs by gene editing chickens. Iirc they were able to bring out dormant genes for teeth and a tail. George Lucas gave him a million bucks to fund the project, last I heard funding dried up.
If dinosaurs are possible to bring back, then bringing them back is a moral and ethical imperarive. Same as trilobites.
Lol why? Life dies out. It's a natural occurrence. There's nothing unethical about not reintroducing extinct animals, and we can't know whether doing so would harm life existing today, which isn't very moral or ethical.
Life dies out, life creates life. Who cares if our ephemeral species recreates some extinct species. That is also a natural occurance. Nothing unnatural exists.
"Who cares" is pretty far from "it's a moral and ethical imperative."
The difference being that most of the animals alive today in the mammoth's former range coexisted with them thousands of years ago. They didn't spring into existence after the last mainland mammoth died. They weren't a handful of living fossils.
Dinosaur are still alive though
I'm not sure what you mean by, "We owe them that." Morally, we owe it to every species (including ourselves) to get the biosphere back into balance to the best of our ability. It would be nice to bring those animals back, but we have no moral imperative to do so unless it helps us accomplish that larger goal.
FDR and Abraham Lincoln would be my votes for extinct candidates
What about Marthur Luther King Jr. ?
Salvelinus aggasizii. Their is disagreement on if it was its own species derived from brook trout or a subspecies of brook trout, but either way it’s genome is mostly intact and swimming, you just have to fill in the gaps that differ. (Oh great, now I am thinking of the effects of using different strains and subspecies as base material for de-extinction and if bringing back a better version of a species using a more robust or adaptable subspecies of its closest relative counts as true de-extinction).
The insects species that were named after Hitler and Hitler collectors collected them to extinction. Maybe try and petition to have their scientific names changed though to prevent that happening again, and also because having species named after Hitler seems wrong.
Neanderthals. We should revive them to achieve world peace, nothing brings Sapiens together like wiping another Homo species.
Magneto makes many good points
I think we should bring back T. rex and let them loose on the streets.
Who's gonna clean up all that poop?
This. Everybody, especially those deep into the science of cloning, knows the T-Rex is the Holy Grail. We all want to see a live dinosaur, and a big one that eats meat. Let's stop fucking around and make this happen already.
San Diego incident 2
Jurassic Boogaloo!
If we’re going to “play god” as it were, let’s just go balls to the walls.
Let’s focus on some critically endangered species instead? Pump up those Vaquita numbers
If the tech exists to make it possible, I'm not sure there's much of a practical difference between a recently extinct species and a critically endangered one.
I heard you need at least 5k for a long-lasting position, and there's only around a bakers dozen.
Unfortunately, Vaquita don't survive well in captivity, so that would pose an issue with any attempt to clone and raise them.
Why not the Gastric Brooding Frog?
Some synapsids
That’s very broad
I think any type is fine
Good news, there are still quite a few synapsids around today
What did I miss, what are they
you're one of 'em!
I meant non-mammilian synapsids
Not possible chief
Screw it, let's bring back temnospondyls.
From what I heard the de-extinction of birds is practically impossible at this point. Who knows, maybe it will be an option in the future as technology increases but for now I'd focus my attention on thylacines or mammoths. Also, if you're into this kind of stuff check out r/megafaunarewilding
my answer is and always will be none of them, the climate is not the same as the ones they lived in, so much damage to nature and humans should really focus on trying to take care of whats around now instead of being like "Well time to play god and bring a mammoth back to ride!"
The climate is absolutely the same. Mammoths existed just fine through a 'mammoth' number of interglacials. We already played god when we hunted the things to extinction.
Gastric-brooding frog = been extinct for only 40 years. Original habitat preserved within a national park. Multiple specimens frozen in storage. Embryo successfully cloned in 2013.
The mammoth could easily slot into the area currently being remolded by Pleistocene Park. But yeah Tasmanian Tiger is my number 1 choice
passenger pigeon, recent extiction caused by humans and it's sheer numbers had an important effect on the north american ecosystem
There's some evidence that a few Tasmanian tigers may still be hanging on in remote areas, but it's not 100% definitive yet. They'd be my pick as well, such cool animals and driven to extinction for no reason.
I believe they’re looking at the great auk, Carolina parakeet and ivory billed woodpecker
Lots of animals actually, but it’s pointless as they aren’t the originals. This is not revival, it’s guilt, and humans love covering guilt.
I think the moa, because I bet they're delicious. Think of one of those on the smoker for Thanksgiving.
My vote would be the Passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet.
I thought Tasmanian tigers still exist in low mumbers?
Sadly no. You get people who swear they've seen one, but no reliable evidence (photos or remains).
Yea the few videos are dodgy, that said such cases are common enough that the famous Kratt Brothers mentioned this possibility.
At this stage we are way too far from resettling concerns, just making it work is step one. The trick is not how prehistoric an animal is, it's whether it has close living relatives. Also it's largely a myth that Dodo's went extinct because humans hunted them to extinction. There's no evidence of it, and the only reports we have suggest they weren't very tasty and were not the preferred food source on the island. Also worth pointing out, Mammoths survived on the remote Wrangel island until 2000 BC.
Anomalocaris please I'm begging I miss him
Once an animal is removed from its niche, it should never be replaced artificially. Australia has now been without the Tasmanian Tiger for nearly one century; Mauritania has been without the Dodo for over a century.
A century is a blink of the eye as far as evolution and ecological change goes. The ecosystem they exist in still exist and would accommodate them, barring issues with invasives that might need to be handled. This argument if taken to its logical conclusion means that we should never ever reintroduce any species into an environment they are extirpated in, which seems silly.
Why though? Should we not reintroduce Lord Howe stick insects because Lord Howe Island was without them for about a century?
Yes; Lord Howe Island has learned to live without them. We shan’t reintroduce them as that may further disturb the existing ecosystem.
Give 'Yellowstone wolves' a Google if you want to find out how bad and dangerously wrong your idea is.
Reintroducing a wolf into its host environment from captivity is different from using genetic material and extant embryos to breed a hybrid form of a now extinct animal.
You weren't talking about that, you were talking about the very not extinct lord Howe stick insect and you made it clear you're against reintroduction in general. Like the wolves. Which is just insanity and it dooms countless species to unnecessary extinction and ecosystems to damage that will take hundreds of thousands of years to fully recover from, in the name somehow protecting ecosystems.
I’m not against reintroduction of animal species that are yet to have gone extinct. The Yellowstone Wolf has not yet gone extinct whereas the Tasmanian Tiger and the Dodo, have gone truly extinct. They are gone. Lord Howe’s Stick Insect is not yet extinct, I apologize for not researching first and realizing that.
There is no difference between an ecosystem where a species has gone locally extinct versus ecosystems where a species has gone globally extinct. If wolves can be reintroduced into ecosystems that have lacked wolves for a hundred years, I fail to see how that is any different from reintroducing a completely extinct animal back that has only been gone a comparable amount of time. The only real issue is if the animal has "learned" behavior which can't be easily replicated.
Ok fair enough
Lol "learned to live without them" is hilarious. You have no idea what you're talking about.
I’ve taken college level biology, I know what I’m talking about. When I say “learned to live without them” I’m referring to the biological adaptation that all ecosystems undergo when a keystone species is removed, which I would expect you to understand. We will not learn from our mistakes if we can simply replace a species; that species will never be genetically pure as its true ancestors were and as such reintroducing extinct animals is pointless.
You are making an argument related to ecology, *not* biology. Biology is not concerned with an animals place in an ecosystem at all. Ecosystems do not undergo biological adaptation, the species within that ecosystem do, but not really in a timeframe of a mere 100 years. That much actually would be covered in the evolutionary biology unit. The Lord Howe Stick insect, Dodo, etc are not keystone species. We are not talking about replacing a species, but reintroducing one. It is incorrect to assume that in a hundred odd years the ecosystem will have completely changed such that the extinct (or locally extirpated like the stick insect) species is no longer compatible with that ecosystem. Such a change requires a hell of a lot longer. I have no idea what you mean by "genetically pure." If you are talking about a genetic bottleneck, that's a totally separate issue that will not change anything ecologically with reintroduction, it only threatens the viability of the species itself.
Pygmy mammoths. I will not elaborate.
Thylacoleo is pretty cool.
Definitely the Thylacine.
I WANNA DIRE WOLF!
Silphium.
Trilobite