5 Extinct Animals Science Will Bring Back to LIFE Next

[00:00:00]Science told you extinction was forever.

[00:00:03]That once an animal disappears, it is gone. No second chances. But right now, in laboratories across the world, scientists are bringing extinct animals back to life. And here's the part that will really get you. One of them has already come back. It only survived for 7 minutes. But those seven minutes proved that extinction might not be permanent. In this video, I'm going to show you five extinct animals that science is working to bring back right now. And the last one on this list has a target date, not someday, a specific year, and it is closer than you would believe. Let's start with the animal that already came back, even if only for a moment. High in the Pyrenees mountains of Spain, a wild goat called the bukardo ruled the cliffs for thousands of years.

[00:00:56]But hunters wanted its horns. By the late 1990s, only one was left. Her name was Celia. On January 6th, 2000, a ranger found her dead beneath a fallen tree. The Bicardo was extinct. But before Celia died, scientists took tissue samples from her ear and froze them in liquid nitrogen. In 2003, a researcher named Joseé Fulch cloned her.

[00:01:20]His team implanted 57 embryos into surrogate goats. Seven pregnancies took hold. One baby was born alive. For 7 minutes, an extinct animal breathed again. Then it died. It died from a lung defect. The Bicardo became the first animal brought back from extinction and the first to go extinct twice, but the science worked. The clone was real. The samples are still frozen. And the technology has improved enormously since 2003. Extinction is not necessarily permanent. The door has been opened. The question is, what walks through it next?

[00:01:57]And what comes next broke every rule of biology.

[00:02:00]In 1972 in Queensland, Australia, scientists found a frog that did something no other animal has ever done.

[00:02:08]The southern gastric brooding frog swallowed her own fertilized eggs, turned her stomach into a womb, shut off her stomach acid, and gave birth by vomiting fully formed babies out of her mouth. Then it vanished. Last seen in 1981, declared extinct in 2002. But in 2013, Professor Mike Archer at the University of New South Wales launched the Lazarus project. His team implanted preserved cell nuclei from the extinct frog into eggs from a living relative, the great barred frog, and the cells began to divide. Dead DNA from a species gone for over 30 years woke up inside a living egg. The embryos did not survive past the early stages. But the team confirmed the genetic material belonged to the extinct frog. Its code still runs. Its DNA still works. And the Lazarus project is not finished. If dead DNA can divide again, what else is possible?

[00:03:10]If you had to pick one animal that means extinct, it's the dodo. dead as a dodo.

[00:03:16]The phrase exists because this bird became the world's most famous example of permanent disappearance. The dodo lived on Maitius in the Indian Ocean.

[00:03:25]About 3 ft tall, 50 lb, flightless, with no natural predators, and no fear of humans. When Dutch sailors landed in 1598, the dodo walked right up to them.

[00:03:37]By 1681, every single one was dead. For 300 years, the dodo was the symbol of extinction. But not anymore. In 2023, Colossal Biosciences announced the dodo as a de-extinction target. Beth Shapiro at UC Santa Cruz had already sequenced its full genome. The closest living relative is the Nicabar pigeon. The plan is to edit pigeon cells to carry dodo traits and breed them into living birds.

[00:04:06]Colossal has raised over $225 million.

[00:04:10]And Mauricius has expressed interest in receiving deextincted dodos for the same island where they were destroyed. The symbol of forever gone may become the proof that forever does not exist. But the dodo is only Colossal's third priority. Their second target has something the dodo never had. Film footage of the last one alive.

[00:04:33]There is actual video of the last Tasmanian tiger. Black and white footage from 1933 shows it pacing in a concrete enclosure at the Bomarus Zoo. Stripes like a tiger, jaws that open wider than any predator alive today. It doesn't know it's the last of its kind. The thyloine was the largest carnivorous marsupial of modern times. It hunted across Australia and Tasmania for millions of years. Then farmers claimed it killed sheep. The government paid bounties. Over 2,000 were killed. On September 7th, 1936, the last one died alone in that zoo.

[00:05:13]Professor Andrew Pasque at the University of Melbourne leads the Thai GRR lab. His team is using the Fat Tailed Dunard, the thyloine's closest living relative, as the genetic starting point. In 2023, they extracted RNA from a specimen that was 130 years old. No one had ever pulled RNA from an extinct species before. By 2024, they had the most complete thyloine genome in history. They have the genome. They have the RNA. They've created the first marsupial stem cells ever made. The plan is to use crisper to edit DNA in the Dunart until it expresses thyloine traits, create embryos, and bring them to term in a surrogate. We watch the last thyloine die on camera. We might watch the first new one take its first breath on camera, too. And yet, even the thyloine isn't the biggest deextinction project on Earth. That belongs to something that hasn't walked this planet in over 4,000 years.

[00:06:17]The woolly mammoth stood 11 ft tall. It weighed 6 tons, its tusks curved like crescent moons. For tens of thousands of years, it walked alongside our ancestors. Humans painted it on cave walls and built shelters from its bones.

[00:06:32]Most mammoths vanished 10,000 years ago, but a small group survived on Wrangler Island in the Arctic until just 4,000 years ago. Mammoths were still alive when the pyramids were already standing.

[00:06:45]George Church, a geneticist at Harvard, has been editing Asian elephant cells with mammoth genes since 2015. The Asian elephant shares 99.6% 6% of its DNA with the mammoth. In 2021, Church co-founded Colossal Biosciences. The team is using Crisper to edit roughly 60 mammoth genes into elephant cells. Cold adapted blood, thick fat, smaller ears, dense hair.

[00:07:14]They are not reading ancient DNA anymore. They are writing it into living cells. And here is the date, 2028.

[00:07:23]That is when Colossal plans to produce the first mammoth calves. In Siberia, a scientist named Sergey Zemov has already prepared a site called Pletosene Park for them. 2028 is not 100 years from now. A woolly mammoth could take its first breath while you are still watching videos on this channel. The ice age ended them. Science might undo it.

[00:07:48]So, there you have it.

[00:07:51]Five extinct animals.

[00:07:54]Five chances to break the oldest rule in nature. One already came back for seven minutes. Dead DNA from a frog divided inside a living egg. The dodo has its genome mapped in a company behind it.

[00:08:09]The thyloine's RNA has been pulled from a specimen older than your great grandparents. And the mammoth has a date. For all of human history, extinction meant the end. That rule held for millions of years. It might not hold much longer. Most people have no idea this is happening. Now you do. Which one comes back first? The dodo, the thyloine, or the mammoth? Drop your pick in the comments and subscribe because next time we're covering creatures science says can never come back. You don't want to miss that one. Extinction used to be the end of the story. Not anymore.