Biotech company Colossal Biosciences said it has brought back the dire wolf, an animal that went extinct 10,000 years ago, through its de-extinction process.
Well to be fair we don’t know what the ecological effects of them would be. They could well be positive. This is a species that many of our living species today coexisted with for millions of years before they went extinct in the recent past. It’s possible (I think likely) that today’s ecosystems are meaningfully impaired by their absence in ways we can’t recognize because we have never studied what the complete ecosystem would look like.
In my mind it would be worthwhile to create a small preserve and study what those interactions look like. We thought gray wolves were harmful to nature for hundreds of years until we actually did the science to find out we were wrong.
Well to be fair we don’t know what the ecological effects of them would be. They could well be positive. This is a species that many of our living species today coexisted with for millions of years before they went extinct in the recent past. It’s possible (I think likely) that today’s ecosystems are meaningfully impaired by their absence in ways we can’t recognize because we have never studied what the complete ecosystem would look like.
In my mind it would be worthwhile to create a small preserve and study what those interactions look like. We thought gray wolves were harmful to nature for hundreds of years until we actually did the science to find out we were wrong.