Animals That Scientists Are Trying to Bring Back from Extinction

Wherever human beings have gone, they have driven animals to extinction, whether those animals were hunted to extinction or if were merely outcompeted.

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This is not a new phenomenon. Tens of thousands of years ago, the disappearance of megafauna anywhere in the world coincided with the arrival of human beings. In Europe, the famed woolly mammoth disappeared. In the Americas, strange animals like the glyptodon were hunted to extinction, and in Australia, 85% of all animals weighing over 100 pounds went extinct after humans arrived! This included omnivorous kangaroos, super-sized koalas, and enormous wombats.

More recently, human activity has caused the extinction of the moa, the passenger pigeon, and the dodo. But does this mean these species are gone forever? Here are six extinct animals that scientists want to bring back from the dead.

1. An Extinct Animal From the Tip of Afican

The quagga was a sub-species of plains zebra that roamed the southern tip of Africa. It was distinctive in that it had stripes on its head and the front half of its body, while the rear half was brown. It was hunted to extinction in the wild, and the last specimen died in 1883 in the Amsterdam Zoo.a

The Quagga Project aims to rectify human mistakes by bringing this extinct animal back to life. As far back as the 1950s, it was suggested that Quaggas could be re-bred via selective breeding. In 1980, this theory got a major boost when research on mitochondrial DNA proved the quagga was indeed a subspecies of the plains zebra.

In 1987, nine zebras were selected and brought to a specially constructed breeding camp farm near Robertson in South Africa. This was the start of the project to re-breed the quagga. Since then, additional zebras have been selected for their quagga-like traits and brought into the program; however, the increase in zebras required the project to be expanded to additional sites where the zebras could be cared for.