The ethics of cloning extinct animals

[max-greece]

Well before we get all excited at the prospect of a slew of dinosaurs and marine reptiles tearing up the place I don't think its likely we will see those cloned any time soon.

More likely are recently extinct creatures or particularly well preserved ones. Personally I'd love to see a Tasmanian Tiger and we might find a sufficiently well preserved Mammoth in the Tundra but I'd be really surprised if we managed to get enough viable DNA to restore any creature more than about 10,000 years old - and precious few of those.

Would love to see a ground sloth too - they were enormous and all but bullet-proof but it doesn't look like they lived in areas where soft-tissue would be well enough preserved.

I imagine Dire Wolves would be popular too for some reason....

I suspect there is a big gap between DNA that is well enough preserved to unambigiously establish relationship with living animals, and having DNA well preserved enough so it is simple to make a viable clone of the original animal.

I am guessing even with DNA of animals that have died just a few thousand years ago, resurrection would not involve cloning so much as trying to compare degraded DNA from many different cells, guessing what the degraded sections might have originally looked like, trying to arificially rebuild these sections, and then crossing your fingers and hoping the resulting animal would be viable.

Agreed. I'd suggest on this basis, therefore, that only those examples well preserved enough which also have close living relatives would be good candidates as you could borrow existing DNA to fill in the gaps.

Mammoth/Elephant might be. Dire Wolf/ Grey wolf should be.

The result wouldn't be exactly like the original species - more a "close enough" facsimile.