Bringing back the dead: de-extinction, should we bring back extinct animals?

I'm pretty sure it wasn't evolution that fucked up the dodo. We could build a better dodo, even if it was. Let's go for it.

Is this such a jump from repopulating the wild with animals that have died out in one place but survived elsewhere?

I vote yes, for the lulz

The main problem with bringing back extinct animals is that there would be no habitat for them to live in, so either they'd require constant protection in small reserves or else just live in zoos exclusively.

No we shouldn't. Own your destruction and don't forgive yourself like this.

Aimless otm

No we shouldn't. Own your destruction and don't forgive yourself like this.

― imago, Wednesday, September 28, 2016 6:31 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is how I feel, basically.

We should exclusively bring back extinct animals that preyed largely on humans. Returning to the food chain would be beneficially humbling experience, I feel.

anyone who has seen the Jurassic Park movies would know the answer to this one

wouldn't the revived dodo have ample habitat as long as people refrained from actively massacring it?

Tasmanian Tiger on the other hand would just die out again

I might make an exception for Haast's Eagle

xpost Old Lunch you really need to read Monster of God by David Quammen if you haven't

Ooooh, that looks good! Thanks!

amazing book

Are there any of these species that could be used to preserve or improve environments? Like ones that help certain trees to grow etc

PS Bees, I suppose?

well... bees, pretty soon :(

xpost ha

Apex predators are usually good for improving environments iirc

this is a really interesting conundrum. i could imagine being in favor of it, on a limited scale, with proper oversight. humans created the current extinction event, so it would be nice if we could take steps to repair the damage. as aimless said, the main problem would be reintroducing species to habitats that no longer support them. there have been successes in reestablishing species that were nearly extinct (and failures too), but i'm not sure how that would translate to species that have gone completely extinct.

too bad we can't replicate earth in a distant galaxy and repopulate with everything except for humans

Could mammoths still live in Siberia?

Or are there now too many predators (humans)?

bring back these dudes imo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_gigantism#/media/File:Archaeoindris_fontoynonti.jpg

wouldn't the revived dodo have ample habitat as long as people refrained from actively massacring it?

Tasmanian Tiger on the other hand would just die out again

― I wish you could see my home. It's... it's so... exciting (Jon not Jon), Wednesday, September 28, 2016 12:36 PM (forty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Don't call it a comeback. Maybe?

https://weather.com/science/nature/news/tasmanian-tiger-wolf-instinct

iirc the rule is you can bring them back if they were wiped out by-by deforestation, uh, or, the building of a dam, but not, uh, if they HAD their shot and nature SELECTED them for extinction

We shouldn't even bother trying to save animals that can't deal with modern realities tbh

Let's face it, they wouldn't even understand touch screens.

iirc the rule is you can bring them back if they were wiped out by-by deforestation, uh, or, the building of a dam, but not, uh, if they HAD their shot and nature SELECTED them for extinction

― florence foster wallace (difficult listening hour), Wednesday, September 28, 2016 1:32 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

very good

my calling

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

not saying we should exterminate them or make the ones that are alive suffer, and yeah pets are cute and meat and dairy are tasty, but Animals should never have existed in the first place imo, so my answer to this is a resounding NO

You are Thomas Ligotti and I claim my $5

bring back sebastien chikara questions!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes please, it was really unfair what we did to the Neanderthals, we should give them a fair shake now that resources are unlimited and the future habitability of Earth is free of all foreseeable risk

Cavegirl porn would be a thing in, like, half an hour.

we will create new animals, no need to diminish the material available for this by excluding extinct animals on rockist grounds

on rockist grounds

lol, well played, ogmor

I demand the flying calculator-scorpions I was promised

Yes please, it was really unfair what we did to the Neanderthals

otm

It's odd: I support the reintroduction of species that went extinct to Scotland - beavers, wolves etc., but I would balk at the idea of reintroducing something that had gone totally extinct. Not sure why I accept a contradiction there.

we have driven all the natural predators for deer out of urban areas leading to their overpopulation. bringing back sabertooth tigers, domesticating them, and training them to hunt deer is the obvious solution.

who's a good kitty? Who? WHO?

Can we bring back all those useful appliance dinosaurs?

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/1b/cd/bd/1bcdbdcfe7999a4c2ec00b1e796f18ea.jpg

https://blog.etsy.com/en/files/2010/09/Wilma_wash.jpg

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/c4/4c/93/c44c932248cddd24d2f9eed5faa01285.jpg

https://foxhugh.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/12-warthog-garbage-grinder.gif?w=640

Think of the savings in electricity!

DinoSlavery more like

whenever I want to get nice and depressed I read the wiki entry for the Great Auk:

On the islet of Stac an Armin, St Kilda, Scotland, in July 1840, the last great auk seen in the Britain was caught and killed.Three men from St Kilda caught a single "garefowl", noticing its little wings and the large white spot on its head. They tied it up and kept it alive for three days, until a large storm arose. Believing that the auk was a witch and the cause of the storm, they then killed it by beating it with a stick.

The last colony of great auks lived on Geirfuglasker (the "Great Auk Rock") off Iceland. This islet was a volcanic rock surrounded by cliffs which made it inaccessible to humans, but in 1830 the islet submerged after a volcanic eruption, and the birds moved to the nearby island of Eldey, which was accessible from a single side. When the colony was initially discovered in 1835, nearly fifty birds were present. Museums, desiring the skins of the auk for preservation and display, quickly began collecting birds from the colony. The last pair, found incubating an egg, was killed there on 3 July 1844, on request from a merchant who wanted specimens, with Jón Brandsson and Sigurður Ísleifsson strangling the adults and Ketill Ketilsson smashing the egg with his boot.

Great auk specialist John Wolley interviewed the two men who killed the last birds, and Ísleifsson described the act as follows:

The rocks were covered with blackbirds (referring to Guillemots) and there were the Geirfugles ... They walked slowly. Jón Brandsson crept up with his arms open. The bird that Jón got went into a corner but (mine) was going to the edge of the cliff. It walked like a man ... but moved its feet quickly. (I) caught it close to the edge – a precipice many fathoms deep. Its wings lay close to the sides - not hanging out. I took him by the neck and he flapped his wings. He made no cry. I strangled him.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Guys, guys, guys!!! http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/08/health/dinosaur-tail-trapped-in-amber-trnd/index.html

The tail of a 99-million year old dinosaur has been found entombed in amber, an unprecedented discovery that has blown away scientists.

Xing Lida, a Chinese paleontologist found the specimen, the size of a dried apricot, at an amber market in northern Myanmar near the Chinese border.

The remarkable piece was destined to end up as a curiosity or piece of jewelry, with Burmese traders believing a plant fragment was trapped inside.

"I realized that the content was a vertebrate, probably theropod, rather than any plant," Xing told CNN.

"I was not sure that (the trader) really understood how important this specimen was, but he did not raise the price."

. . . The tail section belongs to a young coelurosaurian -- from the same group of dinosaurs as the predatory velociraptors and the tyrannosaurus.

The sparrow-sized creature could have danced in the palm of your hand.

The amber, which weighs 6.5 grams, contains bone fragments and feathers, adding to mounting fossil evidence that many dinosaurs sported primitive plumage rather than scales.

http://i2.cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/161208121636-dinosaur-amber-2-exlarge-169.jpg

That is so cool.

That's a thrilling photo!

http://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/2075122016/2069586825/gr3.jpg

That's from the scientific paper. There are more images there. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)31193-9

so beautiful

"primitive plumage" is a great name

where is the love for the 99-million-yr-old ant entombed alongside the feather

the paper is full of so much great stuff

intermediate between stages IIIa (rachis with naked barbs) and IIIb (barbs with barbules, lacking a rachis), but it does not exactly fit stage IIIa+b (rachis with barbs bearing barbules)

Fantastic!

I just read that out to my husband forgetting he is extremely well-versed in rachises and barbules and reticulating splines and he was like 'well yeah, of course'

long, naked, filamentous barbs

I feel sorry for the Burmese traders.

Here comes... the Dire Wolf!

https://time.com/7274542/colossal-dire-wolf/

lol I just saw this

When I awoke, the dire wolf
Six hundred pounds of sin
Was grinning at my window
All I said was, "Come on in"

Can we bring back The Ramones?

you'd have to extract some Ramone DNA and then implant it into a suitable host, like The Cro-Mags or something

Just claim you did, nobody will scrutinise it too hard

One of Dee Dee's cigarette butts should provide all the genetic material you would need

There are two wolves inside of you, one is extinct

Hey Daddy-o, I Don't Wanna Clone Down in the Basement

Doubts cast on the dire wolf's return

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g9ejy3gdvo

ah well it was fun while it lasted

Slightly less dire

One of Dee Dee's cigarette butts should provide all the genetic material you would need

DDNA

lol

I'm of an age when my reaction to the words "dire wolf" is "KIT FOX... JENNER... STORMCROW". From Mechwarrior 2, you must remember. I actually finished all but one of the missions with a Nova, armed with a battery of lasers and some jump jets. You could only get off a couple of shots before overheating, but if you aimed for the enemy mechs' legs it only took a couple of shots to cripple them, and the jump jets meant you could avoid incoming fire. Playing with a laser-heavy Nova build was a bit like role-playing as Norman "Bites Yer Legs" Hunter.

The tactic down in one of the boss battles, where you simply couldn't do enough damage before the enemy one-shot you, but for most of the game it was a viable build. I'm sure it was pointed out by Michael Crichton, and it's alluded to in the opening posts from all those years ago, but even if these creatures had 100% accurate DNA they would presumably end up copying the behaviour of whichever animals they were housed with, so they wouldn't behave like old-fashioned dire wolves. They would be a kind of DNA vocoder combining the body of one creature with the behaviour of another.

I wonder how much computing power would be required to model a creature based purely on its DNA. So that you could select a DNA strand and have the computer model the creature from gestation to adulthood. Presumably the computing requirements would be immense. The model would eventually have to recreate an animal brain. But the model wouldn't have to go down to an atomic level, only a cellular level, so it would operate in the realm of Newtonian physics, which is do-able. In the long run this raises the question of why we need so many human beings, when we can just store DNA instead.

Imagine if in Star Trek they didn't have a transporter. They just fired DNA at the planet, with a machine that could reconstitute a human being (plus clothes) from available raw materials. Some ancient myths imagine that the Milky Way is literally god-scale breast milk, so perhaps this kind of thing happened in the distant past. Earlier on, a few minutes ago, and I admit that it's nearing bed-time, but earlier on I ate a bunch of jelly beans out of boredom, and the sugar is just starting to take over, and I'm going to wake up with a furry mouth again.

Ashley with the heat as always

Who needs any direr wolfery than this?

https://www.metal-archives.com/images/3/5/4/0/3540451143_photo.jpg

I can see an argument for bringing back the thylacine, since the last one died in captivity less than 100 years ago, and they were mostly killed off by very modern firearms... however, I don't know what other marsupial you could use for gestation? They're kind of their own thing

Yes, there have been numerous 'sightings' in the wild, but I think if there was a remaining population in hiding, one would have been hit by a car by now