Fossils Are Fine; a Live Beastie Is Better

By NICHOLAS WADE

Published: November 22, 2008

A RESEARCHER at Pennsylvania State University, Stephan Schuster, said in the journal Nature last week that he might be able to regenerate a mammoth from ancient DNA for just $10 million. Given that Chicago’s Field Museum, with the help of McDonald’s and Walt Disney, recently paid $8.36 million for an especially fine Tyrannosaurus rex fossil, Dr. Schuster should be able to sell a pack of live mammoths to zoo managers around the world.

For making the past come alive, a mammoth is a good start, but it’s just a hairy elephant. What other extinct species would be good to have around again? Herein, a wish list.

Because we are so interested in ourselves, the first two resurrected species might be the two close cousins whom our ancestors drove to extinction:

Bettmann/Corbis

The Neanderthal

THE NEANDERTHAL. This species and modern humans split apart some 500,000 years ago, and the Neanderthal adapted to the ice age climate that gripped its European homeland. Scientists in Germany are expected to report soon that they have decoded the full genome. No one knows if Neanderthals could speak. A living one would answer that question and many others.

Peter Schouten/National Geographic Society

The ‘Hobbit’

THE ‘HOBBIT.’ Remains of these downsized humans, more correctly known as Homo floresiensis, were found on the island of Flores four years ago. Paleoanthropologists have been at each other’s throats ever since as to whether the pint-size people with sophisticated stone tools were a new human species or a pathological form of modern humans. Let the little floresians speak for themselves, though first we must find some of their hair.

DNA lasts only 50,000 years or so, an eyeblink of evolutionary time, but genome engineers will eventually get so good at their job, one can surely assume, that they won’t need actual DNA; they will be able to calculate the DNA sequence of any known species by working backward from the genomes of their living descendants. Birds, for instance, evolved from dinosaurs. So put a few nips and tucks in a falcon’s genome and you could doubtless re-create that of a velociraptor. Let’s try resummoning these creatures from their rest in the fossil beds of extinction:

The Sea Scorpion

THE SEA SCORPION. These huge arthropods lived in shallow seas 450 million to 250 million years ago and grew to six feet long and more. Their champion, Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, was a monster of up to eight feet (a gigantic claw was found last year). We are used to insects and spiders being tiny creatures, confined by their breathing system to a small volume. Having a few sea scorpions around would help us understand just how big insects could grow.

Image From Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The Pterodactyl

THE PTERODACTYL. The bird-lovers in Central Park could coo over something more predatory than red-tailed hawks. Quetzalcoatlus had a wingspan of 36 feet and ranged over the Cretaceous sea that once occupied the middle of the United States. This pterodactyl was one of the largest flying animals known and may represent the upper biological limit for flight. Re-creating the species would solve a lot of disputed issues about pterodactyl aerodynamics, including how it got off the ground.

Louie Psihoyos/Corbis

The Hadrosaur

THE HADROSAUR. Of course, dinosaurs of some kind must be resurrected. Best to start with something not too fierce — maybe the plant-eating Parasaurolophus walkeri, a creature with an amazing hollow head crest whose purpose has sparked a multitude of theories. The latest idea is that the crest was a resonance chamber that let the three-ton monsters generate a mighty bellow. A dawn chorus from these behemoths would get everyone’s attention.

And if the genome engineers wanted to conjure up something actually useful:

THE BIOFUELIFER ANTI-ARRHENIUS. Svante Arrhenius would never have invented the greenhouse effect if he’d heard of this cycad plant. It gulped in carbon dioxide and methane through its leaves and exuded streams of high-octane petroleum products through its bark as a defense against beetles. Not only that, it had bright red leaves that were good to eat. Though some said they tasted a little like herring. Florida was once the home of this herbaceous panacea. Converting the entire state to a plantation of these palm trees could solve a lot of problems.