I was just reading about the TaurOs_Project, an effort to recreate the extinct Aurochs, which died out over four hundred years ago.
Absent some kind of direct manipulation of DNA and/or recovery from frozen 10,000 year old carcasses and the like, could a similar approach be applied to other species, to recreate (say) the Dodo, the wooly mammoth, or australopithecene? Dinosaurs? What are the obstacles?
I don’t think this will produce an Auroch, maybe a similar animal, that is looks like an Auroch, but not an Auroch. I think the only way to “reproduce” a species would require a viable cell from the extinct species and clone like Dooly the sheep via somatic cell nuclear transfer. Don’t imagine there are very many viable cells of extinct species out there.
You’re talking about breeding back.
You couldn’t do it for dodos or mammoths since they have no living descendants to breed back from.