Which three extinct animals would you invite to dinner?

Take a couple of haploid cells, snip snip, reverse engineer them into the gametes of an extinct beast...

Russ Swan

You've probably seen those ghastly memes that infest every social media platform, with questions like 'if you could invite any three people to dinner, alive or dead, who would they be?' I mean, it goes without saying that alive would be better than dead. But if you could invite any animal back into existence, what would it be? It's not as daft as it may sound, for the science of de-extinction has moved from the pages of a Michael Crichton novel to a laboratory near you. There are a number of potential mechanisms that might make this a reality. Extracting DNA from blood in the stomachs of mosquitoes preserved in amber might sound clever but is rather quaint compared to the realities now unfolding.

Cloning is an obvious candidate but has the major drawback that it's really hard to obtain a cell nucleus in good condition from an animal that doesn't exist anymore. It almost worked when a baby Pyrenean ibex was born, cloned from skin tissue of the last surviving member of the species, in 2003. The offspring survived only a few minutes but showed that the approach has potential. Gene editing might offer better prospects. Crispr/Cas9 has fairly revolutionised genomic science in the last decade or so, and has great potential in de-extinction. Take a couple of haploid cells, snip snip, reverse engineer them into the gametes of an extinct beast, and Bob's your second uncle twice removed. There are probably a million ways this could go disastrously wrong with each attempt, a trillion ways to fail when manufacturing an ovum of a long-gone species, but nobody said it would be easy.

It's a decade since a serious proposal to recreate the woolly mammoth was launched. The plan was to gene edit using DNA extracted from recovered mammoth carcasses and fertilise an Asian elephant to create a kind of half-breed: an elemoth, or should that be a mammophant? Further cross-breeding means that by the fourth generation you've got a beast that is about 94% mammoth.

Least authentic, but perhaps most likely to succeed, is the process of iterative evolution, or re-evolution. The idea is that when a species becomes extinct, sooner or later another will evolve to fill the niche. This is a poor approach for two reasons. First, it can take hundreds of thousands of years, and frankly I'm too impatient, and second is that simply filling a niche is not true re-evolution. Dolphins filled the niche left by ichthyosaurs and even look superficially similar, but they ain't dinos! Delightfully, the process of de-extinction by iterative evolution is known as the Elvis taxon, a reference to the many Elvis impersonators who are a bit like, but not quite, the real thing.

Whichever technology you chose, the question of what to use it for remains. We're back to that meme: which three extinct animals would you invite to dinner? As guests, or maybe as the main course. High on the list must be those unfortunates wiped off the face of the planet during the Anthropocene extinction event (the one our species is causing).

I've given this a bit of thought. The dodo for sure - because it's just funny. The mammoth, because who wouldn't want to see and hear a herd of these giants? And, without doubt, Tyrannosaurus Rex. Despite the whole movie franchise pointing out that this might be a bad idea, I can’t get past the delicious notion of having a Rex called Elvis; a king named after the king.

Author: Russ Swan