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Published online 19 November 2008 | Nature 456, 310-314 (2008) | doi:10.1038/456310a
Updated online: 7 January 2009

News Feature

Darwin 200: Let's make a mammoth

Evolution assumes that extinction is forever. Maybe not. Henry Nicholls asks what it would take to bring the woolly mammoth back from the dead.

Henry Nicholls

In 1990 the late Michael Crichton gave the idea of reviving extinct species a slickly plausible and enormously entertaining workout in his novel Jurassic Park. At that time the longest genome that had ever been sequenced was that of a virus.

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  • Your article was very intriguing and enormously entertaining, as good as a Michael Crichton sequel. Perhaps the biggest hurdle really is that there is no more room for the species that are here on Earth today. Human activities (modern agriculture practices, urban development, resource extraction, etc.) are encroaching on wildlife habitat all over the globe making it nearly impossible for current-day African elephants and Asian elephants and all their ecosystem fauna and flora co-inhabitants to survive in reserves of adequate size. As amazing as it would be to see a living mammoth, as you also say in your article, where indeed would we find to place these large-habitat requiring creatures where they would not be displacing a native animal or where they would not over-graze some native plant ecosystem? But it still stirs the imagination in all of us who read Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World" as children. L. Saul-Gershenz, Conservation Scientist, SaveNature.Org

    • 29 Nov, 2008
    • Posted by: Leslie Saul-Gershenz