How Extinct Animals Could Be Brought Back From The Dead

The caveat is that you need an entire cell to do this, and cells break down quickly after death. An animal like the thylacine, which went extinct almost a hundred years ago, simply couldn't be resurrected like that.

But it may be an option for recently extinct species.

In 2003, researchers successfully cloned the Pyrenean ibex, a type of goat that became extinct when the last living individual was killed by a falling tree. Unfortunately, the newborn died shortly after birth due to a lung defect.

Archer is currently using a version of cloning technology to bring back the southern-bellied frog, a species native to Queensland that went extinct in 1983. The animal had a strange method of reproduction by swallowing its fertilized eggs and using its stomach. like a species. mother's womb

In 2013, he took the first step, transferring a frozen tadpole nucleus into an empty egg of a closely related amphibian. Incredibly, the cells began to divide and the embryo was formed.

"We've done it hundreds of times and it didn't work, and then all of a sudden one of them worked, and we saw this hybrid embryo start dividing under the microscope, and it was very exciting," says Archer.

However, after this initial excitement, the project failed when none of the embryos developed into tadpoles or frogs.

"The frog embryos developed into a ball of cells, which is normal embryonic development, but then they stopped," says Archer.

"Usually the outer layer of cells folds over and you get a two-layer structure that results in a tadpole, but that was not the case with us."

The same was true when the team tried to create an embryo using two living frog species, suggesting that it was some aspect of their experimental work that disrupted the embryo's development, rather than a problem with the extinct frog's DNA.

"We're working to figure out what this barrier is in living frogs before tracing the DNA of an extinct animal," says Archer.