Scientists come up with a way to resurrect a completely extinct animal

The ambitious project will use advances in genetics, old DNA extraction and artificial reproduction to bring the animal back. tells CNN.

“We are strongly in favor of protecting our biodiversity from further extinction in the first place, but unfortunately we are not seeing a slowdown in species extinction,” says Andrew Pask, professor at the University of Melbourne.

“This technology offers a chance to correct this and can be applied in exceptional circumstances when the main species have been lost,” he added.

The amazing project is the result of a collaboration with Colossal Biosciences, founded by tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church, who are working on an equally ambitious, if not more ambitious, $15 million project to “resurrect” the woolly mammoth in an altered form.

The Tasmanian wolf (thylacin), the size of a coyote, disappeared about 2000 years ago almost everywhere except the Australian island of Tasmania. As the only marsupial apex predator living in modern times, it played a key role in its ecosystem, but this also made it unpopular with humans.

European settlers on the island in the 1800s blamed thylacines for the death of livestock (although in most cases wild dogs and human habitat mismanagement were the culprits), and they hunted Tasmanian tigers, as marsupial wolves are also called, to their complete extinction.

The last thylacine to live in captivity, named Benjamin, died from exposure in 1936 at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Tasmania. This monumental loss occurred shortly after the thylacines were granted protected status, but it was too late to save the species.

The project includes several complex phases, including cutting-edge science and technology, such as gene editing and the creation of artificial queens.

First, the team will create a detailed genome of the extinct animal and compare it with that of its closest living relative, the fat-tailed marsupial mouse, to identify differences.

“Then we take living cells from our marsupial mouse and edit their DNA in all the places where it differs from thylacine DNA. Basically, we are designing our mouse cage to become a Tasmanian tiger cage,” Professor Pask explained.

Andrew Pask says that once the team has successfully programmed the cell, stem cells and reproductive technology using the fat-tailed marsupial mouse as surrogates will “turn that cell back into a living animal.”

“Our ultimate goal with this technology is to return these species to the wild, where they played an absolutely important role in the ecosystem. Therefore, we hope that one day you will see them again in the bushland of Tasmania, ”said the scientist.

The fat-tailed marsupial is much smaller than the adult Tasmanian tiger, but Pask said all marsupials give birth to tiny babies, sometimes the size of a grain of rice. This means that even a mouse-sized marsupial can serve as a surrogate mother for a much larger adult animal like the thylacine, at least in the early stages.

“Any release like this requires studying the animal and its interactions in the ecosystem over many seasons and over large areas of closed land before you decide to consider full wildlife restoration,” the scientist says.

The team hasn’t set a timeline for the project, but Ben Lamm said he believes progress will be faster than efforts to bring back the woolly mammoth, noting that elephants take much longer to gestate than marsupials.

“All the technologies we are developing to revive the thylacine have immediate conservation benefits – right now – to protect marsupials. Biobanks of frozen tissue from living marsupial populations have been collected to protect against extinction due to fires, Pask says. “However, we still lack the technology to take this tissue—to create marsupial stem cells—and then turn those cells into a living animal. This is the technology that we will develop as part of this project.”

However, before the implementation of the plans of scientists, a difficult path lies ahead. Tom Gilbert, professor at the GLOBE Institute at the University of Copenhagen, said there are significant restrictions on the revival.

Recreating the complete genome of a lost animal from DNA found in old marsupial wolf skeletons is extremely difficult, and therefore some genetic information will be lost, explained Gilbert, who is also director of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics. He was involved in the resurrection of the extinct Christmas Island rat, also known as the Maclear rat, but is not involved in the project to resurrect the Tasmanian wolf. The team will not be able to accurately recreate the thylacine, but will instead create a hybrid animal, a modified form of the thylacine.

“We are unlikely to get the complete genome sequence of an extinct species, so we will never be able to completely recreate the genome of the lost form. There will always be some parts that cannot be changed, says Professor Gilbert. “They will have to choose what changes to make. So the result is a hybrid.”

It’s possible, he said, that the genetically deficient thylacine hybrid might have health problems and might not survive without a lot of help from humans. Other experts question the very idea of ​​spending tens of millions of dollars trying to resurrect extinct fauna when so many living animals are on the brink of extinction.