Or to eat them. I'm sure extinct species are the most delicious, that's why they got eaten.

I don't know, the dodo was appearently fowl tasting.

Bah, it just needed more salt!

For those claiming we don't want Jurassic Park, you do realize that's a movie where all the problems are caused by the most idiotically designed zoo in human history, not the presence of dinosaurs, right?

Plus cloned animals are gonna be too stupid to actually hunt for food like in the movie.

Obviously you can't reintroduce these species to the wild, but absolutely we should clone extinct animals if we ever get the resources to do that. Aside from the Rule Of Cool I think it's important that we help preserve the awesome kinds of life on Earth, what with us being the only ones who can.

Damn Bears aren't going to step up to the plate. THEY don't have the balls to teabag mother nature like we do!

Yes, we probably should clone extinct animals, but for obvious reason (invasive species), we can't release them into nature.

We could if they occupied now empty ecological niches. For example, reintroducing thylacines, which were important predators in Tasmania; now that dingoes are gone from southern Australia, reintroduction of thylacines there could also occur.

It would be difficult to predict all of the consequences of reintroducing these animals, and disastrous if we make the wrong call.

Well, reintroducing the small varieties of plesiosaur would be awesome.

I fully support cloning terror birds. Just because I think it would make life more interesting.

Being killed and eaten by something that goofy-looking would add insult to injury.

edited 29th Nov '11 1:44:10 AM by Carciofus

Yes, we should do anything possible with technology.

We should bring back the Hyracotherium. They were like fox-sized horses. Adorable!

I'm not really sure. Cloning them for research abilities would be nice to increase our understanding of evolution, but then you've got unfortunate moral implications to deal with. Cloning them and releasing them into the wild would be... well, awesome, but it'll wreak havoc on the present natural ecosystem where animals wouldn't normally need or have adaptations necessary to deal with animals from millions of years ago.

Who says that we'd have to release the clones into the wild?

Aww, disappointment...

What about extinct animals which relied on wildly different environmental conditions?

For example, who would not love having dragonflies with a 75 cm (2.5 ft) wingspan flying around? But on the other hand, it is doubtful whether such an organism could even survive in an atmosphere with the current oxygen concentration: its respiratory system, like most insects', was rather primitive...

Yeah, I agree with the article. Cloning mammoths within five years seems fairly unrealistic. Give it twenty more years, at least.

edited 6th Dec '11 11:17:42 PM by Carciofus

So we just keep the dragonfly in a room that's having extra oxygen pumped in and let visitors view it through a window.

I don't fish, but giant dragonfly would probably make awesome fishing-tackle.