Nearly 100 years after its extinction, scientists are planning on bringing the Tasmanian tiger back to life again.
The animal officially known as the Thylacine which used to roam Australia will be resurrected thanks to new genetic technologies. Scientists will use ancient DNA retrieval and artificial reproduction to bring the animal back from extinction.
"We would strongly advocate that first and foremost we need to protect our biodiversity from further extinctions, but unfortunately we are not seeing a slowing down in species loss, this technology will offer a chance to correct our mistakes and could be applied in exceptional circumstances where cornerstone species have been lost," - Andrew Pask University of Melbourne
The last living Tasmanian tiger named Benjamin died from exposure in 1936 at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Tasmania. This loss occurred shortly after Thylacines had been granted protected status, but it was too late to save the species as the damage was too great.
This project is very involved and complicated, but thanks to cutting-edge science and technology, they were able to take living cells from a dunnart and edit the DNA in every place where it differs from the Thylacine. "We are essentially engineering a dunnart cell to become a Tasmanian tiger cell,"
"Our ultimate goal with this technology is to restore these species to the wild, where they played absolutely essential roles in the ecosystem. So our ultimate hope is that you would be seeing them in the Tasmanian bushland again one day,"
