22-07-2025
Extinct Species
MICHELLE WAKIM, REPORTER: What do you think about bringing extinct animals back to life?
PERSON: I think it's a bit scary, but I think it's a really cool idea.
PERSON: The world has adapted without them, but then if they come back, the right climates and stuff won't be right for them.
PERSON: It would be really cool, but it could interrupt the food web or the food chain.
PERSON: It could go really wrong.
PERSON: It could very wrong.
PERSON: Some things would go wrong.
PERSON: It just depends on the animal and what it can do to society, like a dinosaur, that would just not be a good thing.
PERSON: Well, I watched Jurassic Park.
So not the plot of Jurassic Park?
PERSON: Yeah, no, not the plot of Jurassic Park.
PERSON: I think the plot of Jurassic Park would be cool.
When we talk about de-extinction, bringing extinct animals back to life, Jurassic Park, the 1993 sci-fi film, often comes to mind.
JURASSIC PARK: Welcome to Jurassic Park.
But now, in real life, America Biotech company Colossal Biosciences has announced plans to de-extinct this.
Do you know what this animal is?
PERSON: An emu?
PERSON: Uh, it looks like an emu.
PERSON: I don't know.
PERSON: An emu?
This is the moa, and to be fair, it is in the same family as the emu. Moa were big flightless birds that once inhabited New Zealand and became extinct around 500 years ago due to over-hunting, habitat destruction and introduced predators. And the moa isn't the first animal Colossal Biosciences is keen to de-extinct. They've been working on woolly mammoths, the Tassie tiger, and these guys, which the company says are the first dire wolves to be born in more than 10,000 years.
BETH SHAPIRO, COLOSSAL BIOSCIENCES: The process of de-extinction is that we extract DNA from ancient bones, and we sequence that DNA and assemble ancient genomes.
DNA, which stands for deoxyribonucleic acid, is like a blueprint that exists inside the cells of all living things. It's made up of chemical bases, adenine, thionine, cytosine, and guanine. They form the building blocks of DNA, which determines how all living things look and act. Sometimes you can also find DNA preserved in dead things. Now might be a good time to bring in Associate Professor Nick Rawlence. Part of his job is to get DNA out of archaeological, and fossil remains.
NIC RAWLENCE, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO: So, think Jurassic Park, but we don't bring back dinosaurs. De-extinction in the strictest sense is bringing back an animal that has been extinct, bringing it back to life. The only way to do that is through the process of cloning. So, if we think of Dolly the sheep.
NEWS REPORTER: When the world first said, 'Hello Dolly' there were hopes this was the beginning of a revolution.
Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned and was born back in 1996. But the thing about cloning is you need really high-quality DNA for it to work.
ASS. PROF. RAWLENCE: The problem with extinct animals is that for the most part, their DNA is really badly degraded. It's like you've taken that DNA, and you've put it in a wood-fired pizza oven at 500 degrees overnight, and it comes out fragmented in shards, crumbs, dust, chemically modified.
Nic says while we can take these damaged bits of DNA and kind of put them back together like a puzzle, there will be missing pieces and holes in the final product. Sound familiar?
JURASSIC PARK: Gaps in the DNA sequence. We use the complete DNA of a frog to fill in the holes and complete the code, and now, we can make a baby dinosaur.
So, if ancient DNA is too damaged to clone, what is Colossal Biosciences actually doing when they claim to de-extinct animals?
BETH SHAPIRO, COLOSSAL BIOSCIENCES: To de-extinct the moa, we are collecting DNA from all nine species of moa. We'll be comparing the genome sequences to genomes of living birds to identify what it is that made moa unique, and using the tools of genome editing to make those changes in the DNA sequence of the living close relatives.
ASS. PROF. RAWLENCE: So, the only way to get an animal that's similar to one that was extinct is to use genetic engineering. So, bringing back the dire wolf, you've created a genetically engineered grey wolf; you would do the same with emu and moa. A good analogy is if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. What we have is we've got something that looks like a dire wolf, but we're not entirely sure it actually behaves like a dire wolf.
PERSON: If you made it look like it and genetically put it together like that, then it might not have the same behaviours as it had a long time ago.
PERSON: If they're just taking an emu and sort of like changing it to bring it back, I mean, what are we really going to gain from this? I don't think it's very necessary.
PERSON: Why do we need the moa, kind of? It's like, what purpose does it have here? It could maybe endanger emus?
PERSON: They might create a new animal, that's nothing like the original one, that went extinct.
So, knowing all of this, we're left with the classic dilemma.
JURASSIC PARK: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
ASS. PROF. RAWLENCE: I'm against de-extinction. I would say by all means develop the technology but use it to save what we've got left. You could use this technology to genetically engineer animals to be resistant to a disease, giving them the chance to evolve with climate change in a fast-changing world. Colossal scientists said we have a moral obligation to bring back these species and undo the sins of the past; I'd say we need to learn from them, otherwise we're doomed to repeat them.
PERSON: If it's used for commercial purposes, that would cross the line, I reckon. If it's used to kind of help the environment and save endangered species or stuff like that, that could be really good.
PERSON: Maybe like polar bears. I know they're, like struggling because of climate change. So maybe, yeah, doing something for the polar bears.
PERSON: If it's going to cause more harm than good then there's no need to bring them back and take money out of the science budget as a whole.
PERSON: Especially with climate change it's a much better idea to focus on the animals that we have now because, like, we don't know if in a while those animals are going to be extinct as well.
