If we have so many extremely well preserved extinct animals, why have we not attempted to bring some back?
In: Technology
simply not possible at all. DNA breaks down quickly, like within 20-40 yrs. So we may have animals that seem preserved but the dna is not. They tried to piece the Tasmanian tigers dna back together but failed. And that’s only been extinct a matter of decades. The dna also goes hand in hand with the egg cell. The egg cell that goes with that animal provides the machinery to decode the dna. Imagine you had a computer operating system but the computer that could read it no longer existed. So you need at least a closely related animal egg cell & intact dna
The way I understand it is as follows. Having intact strands of DNA from an animal isn’t quite enough. Once you have isolated viable strand you have to kick them from dormancy into cellular activity. Once they become active you have to get them to start replicating the way an embryo does. Once you have a growing embryo you need a host. An artificial womb is a possibility but how would we know what nutrient recipe would be required for an extinct species? The best hop right now would be to implant the embryo in a similar species, like a Wooly Mammoth embryo could possibly be incubated in a Elephant’s womb. A Saber Tooth might be able to be gestated in a lion or some other big cat. Possibly! We don’t know until we get to that point. So far, science isn’t there, yet!
It’s really hard to do and most ancient animals don’t have good remaining cells. However they are working on cells from a frozen woolly mammoth.
The technology is not quite there yet, it would be incredibly expensive, climate and habitat changes since they died out (or that caused them to die out) mean the world is not really a suitable place for them anymore, well preserved specimens of animals does not always mean that the DNA is well preserved and finally almost all animals require a form or social upbring and more often lifelong interaction from other animals of their species. For example a duck raised by chickens behaves like a chicken. How much would you actually learn about ducks from that sort of duck?
[We have](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2009/02/news-bucardo-pyrenean-ibex-deextinction-cloning/). Although the technology to clone animals is not the greatest yet, and it relies on having a similar animal to give birth to the clone, so we wouldn’t be able to clone, say, a brontosaurus.
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