# We can clone extinct species. Should we? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [July 13, 2014, 4:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-can-clone-extinct-species-should-we/692975 "2014-07-13T04:15:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![snowthx](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowthx/32/10660_2.png) [@snowthx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/snowthx)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2025, 6:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-can-clone-extinct-species-should-we/692975/61 "2025-04-10T18:37:08Z")
> [@Loach](#): > > I can’t wait until I get my dire-doodle. My croco-dire will eat your dire-doodle. ---
**Author:** ![Projammer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/projammer/32/559_2.png) [@Projammer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Projammer)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2025, 8:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-can-clone-extinct-species-should-we/692975/62 "2025-04-10T20:23:41Z")
> [@Great\_Antibob](#): > > The half-life of DNA is about half a millennium. So, if you had a 1000 year old sample of human DNA, you might be able to sequence 1/4 of it. After the 13000 years from one of the samples used for the wolves? You might sequence 1 part in over 60 million. So, at best, you can only “compare” a vanishingly small percentage to begin with. This is relevant, but we have thousands of samples that can be sequenced. There should be more than enough overlap in the fragments to reassemble a full chain to compare to. A perfect project to sick an AI on. ---
**Author:** ![Great\_Antibob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47c2d/32.png) [@Great\_Antibob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Great_Antibob)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2025, 8:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-can-clone-extinct-species-should-we/692975/63 "2025-04-10T20:30:10Z")
Maybe? Most are very old, so you roll the dice. If there were currently living samples of the same species (as with humans), it makes the comparison much easier. It’s kind of irrelevant, in any event. The company itself admitted it just kind of tweaked a few genes in gray wolves. It never really said otherwise, though a lot of people took the hint and ran wild with their imaginations anyway. Look up “morphological species concept” which is a term their chief scientist used, and one that should be in some of the articles. The concept itself is controversial to put it mildly. And how Colossal is using it boils down to is “it mostly looks like the same species, so we can treat it as the same species”. This is a horrendous way to ‘clone’ extinct species. As bad, ethically and scientifically, as painting stray dogs, putting them in zoos, and claiming they are red pandas or whatever. If that’s what is being suggested, the answer to “should we” is a resounding “NO”. ---
**Author:** ![Dallas\_Jones](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dallas_jones/32/3277_2.png) [@Dallas\_Jones](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dallas_Jones)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2025, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-can-clone-extinct-species-should-we/692975/64 "2025-04-10T20:50:58Z")
The premise of this thread is entirely wrong, we cannot clone extinct species. Never have. The company that claims to have brought Dire Wolves back from extinction just altered some Grey Wolf DNA to make a pretty white wolf to **look** like those in Game of Thrones. They even named the new doggies after characters in the show. They are no more Dire Wolves than the Labrador sitting next to you. Dire Wolves were not even a canid species and nobody knows even what they looked like. A better dicussion will be possible when someone actually, you know, clones an extinct species. ---
**Author:** ![Projammer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/projammer/32/559_2.png) [@Projammer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Projammer)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 2:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-can-clone-extinct-species-should-we/692975/65 "2025-04-11T02:55:37Z")
> [@Great\_Antibob](#): > > The company itself admitted it just kind of tweaked a few genes in gray wolves. The sites I researched agree that grey wolves share a 99.5 percent match with dire wolves so it makes far more sense to start from there rather that CRISPRing up the desired DNA from scratch. If that could even be done. > [@Dallas\_Jones](#): > > The premise of this thread is entirely wrong, we cannot clone extinct species This is true, and my bad on that. It would have been more correct to say that we can recreate extinct species. > [@Dallas\_Jones](#): > > nobody knows even what they looked like. How do you come to that conclusion? There have been entire corpses recovered from permafrost with most of the body tissue intact, if mummified. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 11:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-can-clone-extinct-species-should-we/692975/66 "2025-04-11T11:03:06Z")
> [@snowthx](#): > > Dire wolves, for an example, along with most ice-age fauna, died-off long before modern humans came along. Dire wolves died out around 10,000 years ago, probably due to competition with and hunting by people virtually identical to us. They didn’t have modern tools, but they were completely modern humans in any biological sense. ---
**Author:** ![SCAdian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/scadian/32/3292_2.png) [@SCAdian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SCAdian)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 12:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-can-clone-extinct-species-should-we/692975/67 "2025-04-11T12:05:53Z")
Oops. Wrong thread… ---
**Author:** ![Great\_Antibob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47c2d/32.png) [@Great\_Antibob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Great_Antibob)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 12:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-can-clone-extinct-species-should-we/692975/68 "2025-04-11T12:18:41Z")
> [@Projammer](#): > > The sites I researched agree that grey wolves share a 99.5 percent match with dire wolves so it makes far more sense to start from there rather that CRISPRing up the desired DNA from scratch. If that could even be done. It doesn’t really work like that. That’s like starting from a human being to generate a Chimpanzee (99% shared genes). There are not only genes that are different, there are genes that exist in humans that never existed at all in chimps and vice-versa. > [@Projammer](#): > > It would have been more correct to say that we can recreate extinct species. Even this is a misstatement. We wouldn’t be “re”-creating extinct species. We’d be just plain creating a new species that hybridizes genetic information from an extant baseline species and whatever we could glean about a related cousin species. Closer in spirit to a liger or tigon. > [@Projammer](#): > > There have been entire corpses recovered from permafrost with most of the body tissue intact, if mummified. As far as I know, not dire wolf corpses. But arctic wolf species that would have lived that far north. If that’s not the case, I would love to know. ---
**Author:** ![Jasmine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jasmine/32/2964_2.png) [@Jasmine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jasmine)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 12:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-can-clone-extinct-species-should-we/692975/69 "2025-04-11T12:27:10Z")
The idealistic me says that we should at least genetically rescue the species we have murdered through out thoughtless and destructive actions, but the pragmatic me says it’s yet another thing we can do to totally screw up the environment. [**Meet my new watch dog.**](https://media.istockphoto.com/id/182761918/photo/tyrannosaurus-rex.webp?s=2048x2048&w=is&k=20&c=Q1GQIrjFzaldf_FqTuP0t14EABOqZOgc9_Z5WdaSHkM=) ---
**Author:** ![snowthx](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowthx/32/10660_2.png) [@snowthx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/snowthx)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 12:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-can-clone-extinct-species-should-we/692975/70 "2025-04-11T12:48:40Z")
I had a feeling someone would come along and point this out. Yes, they were modern humans like us, but there wasn’t as many as recently. 10,000 years ago there was maybe 5-10 million (est) humans, about the same as a large city, like London or Chicago, but spread out around the globe. It’s more than likely a combination of factors led to ice-age extinctions, like climate change as well as competition. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 4:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-can-clone-extinct-species-should-we/692975/71 "2025-04-11T16:20:32Z")
> [@Projammer](#): > > The sites I researched agree that grey wolves share a 99.5 percent match with dire wolves so it makes far more sense to start from there rather that CRISPRing up the desired DNA from scratch. “Percent similarity” in DNA is a very deceptive number. It can mean that out of 200 genes 199 are identical, so you only have to modify one, or it can mean that every gene is 0.5 percent different so that you have to modify all 200. The way “similarly” between two species was traditionally determined was relatively crude. Basically you take the DNA from both species, chop it up, seperate the strands, then mix the two samples together. The strands recombine. Then you heat the mix and measure how much you have to heat it to get the strands to separate again. The better the match, the stronger they bind together. But since nobody has a complete dire wolf genome for comparison, not even that crude method can be used, so that “99.5 percent similar” number is a guess that someone excavated rectally. > **[Divergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5%,...](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC129726/)** > > Five chimpanzee bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) sequences (described in GenBank) have been compared with the best matching regions of the human genome sequence to assay the amount and kind of DNA divergence. The conclusion is the old saw that... ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 5:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-can-clone-extinct-species-should-we/692975/72 "2025-04-11T17:31:05Z")
> [@Dallas\_Jones](#): > > The premise of this thread is entirely wrong, we cannot clone extinct species. Never have. The premise of the thread was not that we can but that someday within (well some of our lifetimes, we are an old crowd) we will. That may not be right but it is not yet wrong. I’m not convinced by an ethical argument. I do believe that a more diverse ecosystem is a more stable one. But I am skeptical that a weakened ecosystem could support the reintroduction? If done it would make sense to build from plant species to herbivores to predators up. The fear of course is that a reintroduction could be overly successful. Akin to an invasive species. And drive current species out. Very recently lost species maybe, as part of a holistic repair of a damaged ecosystem. Other than that? I vote against. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-can-clone-extinct-species-should-we/692975/73 "2025-04-11T18:05:04Z")
> [@TimeWinder](#): > > Given their history and success, I feel confident in predicting that had that collision not happened, dinosaurs would still be the dominant life form on Earth today. By some metrics, they _are_ still a dominant form of life today. There are far more bird species than mammal species. Birds live all over the world, in every biome, in the land, sea, and air. > [@Dallas\_Jones](#): > > The premise of this thread is entirely wrong, we cannot clone extinct species. Never have. We did clone a Pyrenean Ibex and could probably repeat the task pretty easily. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 6:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-can-clone-extinct-species-should-we/692975/74 "2025-04-11T18:13:10Z")
> [@Great\_Antibob](#): > > It doesn’t really work like that. That’s like starting from a human being to generate a Chimpanzee (99% shared genes). There are not only genes that are different, there are genes that exist in humans that never existed at all in chimps and vice-versa. If you had enough of both genomes, there’s absolutely no reason why that couldn’t work. > [@snowthx](#): > > I had a feeling someone would come along and point this out. Yes, they were modern humans like us, but there wasn’t as many as recently. 10,000 years ago there was maybe 5-10 million (est) humans, about the same as a large city, like London or Chicago, but spread out around the globe. It’s more than likely a combination of factors led to ice-age extinctions, like climate change as well as competition. I don’t see how this follows. Animals drive each other extinct all the time. Nautiloids were widespread for hundreds of millions of years, until pinnipeds evolved and nearly drove them extinct in oceans worldwide, except for around Indonesia where pinnipeds never took hold for some reason. Even if early humans weren’t as numerous as us, apes that hunt in packs with rough tools, live in freezing cold and tropical heat alike, and are capable of running almost every living thing into the ground thanks to absolutely ridiculous endurance are going to do SERIOUS damage to an ecosystem. The fact is that the Ice Age we still live in has, for millions and millions of years, gone through repeated cycles of glaciation and inter-glaciation. Climate change certainly wiped out many species during this time, sometimes even whole groups of species. But for the entire duration, every continent had a healthy abundance and diversity of Megafauna. And then, right after we show up, a climate swing that wasn’t even much more extreme than prior ones hits; and suddenly almost all the Megafauna dies all at once, all across the world. The fact that we were there simply _is not_ a coincidence. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/we-can-clone-extinct-species-should-we/692975.md?page=3)