Lifted from the Dragon's Tales

[james_davis_nicoll]

Does Brand ego-google? Anyway, if I was going to make up a list of pundits who could be creatively mined by SF writers as Tommy Gold used to be, Brand would be near the top of the list.

As I recall, Pamela Sargent's Cloned Lives has a concern about recreating lost species via advanced biotech I have not seen elsewhere that I remember: knowing it's possible to bring back a dead species might make it more acceptable to drive species extinct in the first place. Not that people seem all that averse to extinctifying species...

My suspicion is that cute or impressive species would benefit from recreating but the uggos would not. Even if a quarter billion years had not reduced their genetic information to noise, nobody wants to see gorgonopsids or therocephalians come back.

Comments

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Speak for yourself. *I* want to see a gorgonopsid and/or therocephalian.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

That's going to take time travel, alas.

Note that the techniques described depend fairly heavily on having a related species around, even in birds. Much worse in mammals; we don't be getting any thylacines back because of a lack of near-relatives suitable to be incubators, and we might not be able to manage a mammoth if extant elephants have diverged too much.

Still, chickens with alien gonads is a very cool technology and I can see it being immensely useful with the various horribly threatened galliform birds, like sage grouse and sharp-tailed grouse.

[(Anonymous)]

There are still dasyuromorphs around, and given how small marsupials are at birth, it would not be impossible to envision a Tasmanian devil as a host mother for a thylacine. At least until birth - I don't think that lactation is so simple a process with marsupials as it is with placentals and replicating the series of "milks" a mother thylacine would have secreted for her developing offspring might be a challenge.