Caspar Henderson

Raiders of the lost Ark

Even if we could bring back the woolly mammoth (for one), where would it live?, asks Caspar Henderson. And do we really want it anyway?

Years ago, in an ill-conceived attempt to break into natural history radio, I borrowed a nearly dead car from a friend in West Hollywood and drove across town to the Los Angeles Zoo to report on a project to save the California condor from extinction. By the 1980s the number of condors had — thanks in part to the birds’ tendency to fly into live power lines — plunged to a few tens, and the species was on the brink. The remaining individuals were taken into captivity and a breeding programme begun. Newly hatched chicks were raised by hand — that is, by glove puppets made to look like adult condors. The chicks, imprinting on the puppets, would imitate their behaviour, which included avoiding dummy power lines.

Miraculously, I got the car back to its owner and the BBC broadcast my report. That was just about it for me in radio, but the California condor has gone from strength to strength. Birds fledged at the zoo were successfully reintroduced into the wild.

The case of the California condor is just one example of the lengths to which people will sometimes go to prevent extinction. It is by no means the most extreme. Perhaps that prize goes to a project to protect the whooping crane. The few young birds in existence have to learn the autumn migration route of their ancestors from Canada to Florida by following an ultralight aircraft piloted by a human dressed as a crane. I want that job.

But what about bringing species back from the dead? The idea first captured the popular imagination with Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Jurassic Park, in which dinosaurs cooked up from adapted frog DNA roam the earth, grossing the film’s producers more than a billion dollars.

The unentertaining fact is that resurrecting animals that died out 65 million years ago is likely to remain far beyond the bounds of possibility for a very long time to come.

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