Name: The Real Reason We Should Revive Extinct Animals
Uploaded: 2025-11-12T02:11:16.000Z
Duration: 15 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

You see this dog looking animal pacing back and forth in a cage.

That's a Tasmanian tiger, one of the very last of its kind.

It died in 1936, and the species was ultimately declared extinct.

But now scientists are trying to bring them back.

You might have seen headlines about dire wolves or woolly mammoths or dodo birds or passenger pigeons or dinosaurs.

De extinction has become a new and urgent scientific debate that we should all know about.

But when I took a deep dive into what's really going on here, I realized that we're getting this conversation very, very wrong.

Because we're on the cusp of a huge genetic breakthrough.

But the most huge, if true, thing happening here isn't actually bringing back extinct animals.

It's what this means for all the animals alive today.

And very few people seem to know about it.

It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie.

All right, imagine you're a mad scientist and you want to bring back an extinct animal.

Step one, choose your animal like a mammoth.

Now, from here, you need to choose one of three pads, and for each you'll need different ingredients.

You could try to take a close living relative of the animal that you chose and breed a bunch of them together until you get an animal with traits that roughly match the one that you wanted.

This is the same basic process that made my dog Thor out of a wolf.

But instead of trying to make something new and adorable, you're trying to make something old.

It's called back breeding, and it can work, like with this guy.

I actually have a little toy quagga right here.

It's a subspecies of zebra native to South Africa.

They have stripes on the head and neck, and the stripes fade away along the body.

we've already been able to bring a version of it back using back breeding.

This is a really exciting approach and it can work for both animals and plants, but

It takes many generations of zebra to get there.

You don't know which genes will appear when and which will go away.

In reality, it's a cool method that's been done, but probably pretty limited.

I remember in Jurassic park, they pulled dinosaur DNA from blood inside a fossilized mosquito.

And then they cloned the animal based on that DNA.

In real life, though, the ingredients that you need for this method aren't just the extinct animal's DNA.

Because cloning is actually a very specific scientific technique.

The long name is somatic cell nuclear transfer.

It means removing the nucleus out of an egg cell and replacing it with the nucleus of a body or somatic cell of the animal you want to clone.

And then you put that egg with its new nucleus into an animal where it can grow.

People tried this in the early 2000s with an extinct species called the Bucardo.

But by 2000, there was only one Bucardo left.

But luckily, this was four years after Dolly the sheep successfully cloned.

So in an attempt to save the species, some quick thinking biologists put tissue samples from the remaining Bucardo in storage.

And then they were able to take the nucleus from those cells and put them into the cells of domestic goat hybrids.

Unfortunately, their first clone that was born had a malformed lung and didn't survive.

So we are able to clone animals when we have living cells, which is wild.

Carefully preserve the whole cells of a mammoth.

The biggest challenge is needing those living cells in the first place, because it turns out that cells have a shelf life.

Once an animal dies, their cells are typically pretty short lived, dying off within hours or days.

But freezing can dramatically slow this process, which is why there's been hope that animals found preserved in ice, like this 40,000 year old baby mammoth, might have some usable cells, but

so far no revivable cells have been found.

And this one is by far the most popular for the 99.99% of extinct species.

We have to use the third method, gene editing.

If you imagine DNA as a group of blocks, each block here could represent a gene like this one tells me the shape of the skull, and

And maybe this one tells me thick woolly coat.

And then stacked together, they give me the instructions for how to build this specific animal.

The challenge is like living cells have a shelf life, so does DNA.

Once an Animal dies, the DNA in its cells starts to break down into tinier and tinier and tinier fragments until eventually there's nothing left.

That's why right now, we can't bring back animals that went extinct too long ago, like the dinosaurs.

Too much time has passed and their DNA is way too fragmented.

But if we use an animal that died off fairly recently or was frozen in just the right way, scientists can figure out what some of those key missing pieces are and replicate this stack of blocks in another animal.

You compare the stack of DNA blocks of the extinct animal with the blocks of a close living relative to see where the two are different, and

edit the DNA in the living relative so it resembles the DNA in the extinct one.

This is what they're trying to do with woolly mammoths and dire wolves.

But they won't be exactly like the extinct animal.

In fact, people online were really quick to point out that these extinct actually aren't really dire wolves at all.

It's better to think of them as genetically modified gray wolves.

Scientists are choosing which exact traits to manipulate to get the outcomes that they want.

And they want to do it by making the least amount of edits possible.

I asked the scientist in charge of the direwolf project why I'm thinking about de extinction, and

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The Real Reason We Should Revive Extinct Animals

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