Wild, woolly ... and on his way back!

Resurrecting a species that has long been dead is one of the great dreams of science fiction. Who can forget Jurassic Park, with all those revivified dinosaurs roaming a special nature reserve to excite our wonder?

(Although a real Jurassic Park would be better without the bit where everything goes disastrously wrong and some of the dinosaurs begin to eat the visitors.)

could it possibly ever be science fact? today, there are some scientists working on what they have i nelegantly called ‘de-extinction’ who believe it could be.

Beth shapiro is one of these, and she has produced a thoughtful and well-written book on the subject. What animals should be brought back? sadly, for all of us who loved steven spielberg’s film, it won’t ever be dinosaurs.

in the movie, it’s dinosaur blood in the body of a mosquito trapped in amber that provides the key to sequencing a dinosaur genome. unfortunately, as shapiro points out, ancient DnA doesn’t survive for millions of years, whether trapped in amber or not.

We need to look to more recent history and prehistory for our experimental subjects.

the passenger pigeon went from vast numbers in the 19th century, when one flock was estimated to include 3.5 billion birds, to extinction when the last representative of the species — a female named Martha — died in cincinnati Zoo in 1914.

shapiro is herself working on a project aimed at genetically re-engineering a living band-tailed pigeon into (eventually) a revived passenger pigeon.

HoWever, the clever money in the field is on the mammoth — the vast, hairy elephant with enormous, curving tusks, which became extinct i n continental north America and Asia around 8,000 years ago.

they survived in small pockets in isolated places, such as Wrangel island off siberia, until 3,700 years ago. Man, with his relentless hunting, was partially responsible for their disappearance.

the idea of returning such a hugely iconic animal to life is an exciting one. And there are many reasons for believing it might be possible. For one thing, the frozen remains of mammoths are frequently found buried in the siberian permafrost.

they are so common that local people squabble over who gets to sell them to the scientists. shapiro tells the story of a nearly perfectly preserved baby mammoth that was found by a reindeer herder named Yuri Khundi in 2007.

When Khundi went off to tell the director of a local museum about his find, one of his cousins i mmediately s t ol e t he baby mammoth and took it off to town, where he sold it for a year’s worth of food and two snowmobiles.

With no shortage of raw material on which to work, several mammoth projects already exist. A Japanese scientist is trying to clone one using frozen cells and has announced he will do so as early as next year.

And russian sergey Zimov has established what he calls Pleistocene Park in siberia, and is preparing it f or the arrival of resurrected mammoths. But shapiro is not as gung ho about the prospects as Zimov and the Japanese scientist.

indeed, there are times when it seems as if a more honest title for her book would be How it’s going to Be Well-nigh impossible to clone A Mammoth.

For her, cloning as commonly understood is extremely unlikely to produce results. Dolly the sheep was famously brought to life by cloning, but she was created by scientists from a still-living animal.

Mammoth cloning by the same method that produced Dolly is not going to happen. no intact genomes will have survived the 3,700 years since the last mammoth died on Wrangel island.

What shapiro believes is presently possible may not be as headline-grabbing as bold statements that 2016 will see a mammoth walk the earth again — but it’s likely to prove more practical.

she thinks that, by editing an elephant genome, a kind of ‘cut and paste’ mammoth is entirely feasible. We might get no more than a hairier elephant, but, since this would mean resurrecting a mammoth trait, it would be a step in the direction of recreating a mammoth.

For some, this may not seem very enthralling, but shapiro does an excellent job of showing that the realities of genuine science can be as exciting as the fantasies of science fiction.