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Biologists briefly brought the extinct Pyrenean ibex back to life in 2003 by creating a clone from a frozen tissue sample harvested before the goat's entire population vanished in 2000. The clone survived just seven minutes after birth, but it gave scientists hope that "de-extinction," once a pipedream, could become a reality. Ten years later, a group of researchers and conservationists gathered in Washington, D.C., today (March 15) for a forum called TEDxDeExtinction, hosted by the National Geographic Society, to talk about how to revive extinct animals, from the Tasmanian tiger and the saber-toothed tiger to the woolly mammoth and...

Climate Change And Human Hunting Combine To Drive The Woolly Mammoth ExtinctWoolly mammoths were driven to extinction by climate change and human impacts. (Credit: Mauricio Anton) ScienceDaily (Apr. 1, 2008) — Does the human species have mammoth blood on its hands" Scientists have long debated the relative importance of hunting by our ancestors and change in global climate in consigning the mammoth to the history books. A new paper uses climate models and fossil distribution to establish that the woolly mammoth went extinct primarily because of loss of habitat due to changes in temperature, while human hunting acted as the...

REGULAR meals of mammoth meat helped some early human tribes to expand more quickly than their largely vegetarian contemporaries, according to a genetic study. Human populations in east Asia about 30,000 years ago developed at dramatically different rates, following a pattern that appears to reflect the availability of mammoths and other large game. In the part of the region covering what is now northern China, Mongolia and southern Siberia, vast plains teemed with mammals such as mammoths, mastodons and woolly rhinoceroses and the number of early human beings grew between 34,000 and 20,000 years ago. Further south, where the terrain...