A company called Colossal plans to pioneer the de-extinction business, taking species that have died within the past few thousand years and restoring them through the use of DNA editing and stem cells.
It's grabbed headlines recently by announcing some compelling targets: the thylacine, an extinct marsupial predator, and an icon of human carelessness, the dodo.
But there are some major practical hurdles as well, most of them the product of the distinct and extremely slow reproductive biology of the mammoth's closest living relatives, the elephants.
It will be difficult to ensure that we've identified all of the key genetic changes that make for a distinct species; editing in only a portion of them might produce unviable organisms.
But Colossal is forging ahead and cleared one of the many hurdles it faces: It created the first induced stem cells from elephants and will be placing a draft manuscript describing the process on a public repository on Wednesday.
That has proven effective in a variety of species but has a couple of drawbacks due to the fact that the four genes can potentially stick around, interfering with later development steps.
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The Northern giraffe, which lives in pockets from Niger to Ethiopia, has suffered catastrophic losses from civil wars, poaching and the destruction of its wild habitat.
In recent years, Christophe Dufresnes, a herpetologist at Nanjing Forestry University in China, has used this concept to classify different species of frogs in Europe.
Dr. Grabowski’s team has discovered an even more dramatic diversity hiding among European crustaceans, a group of aquatic creatures that includes lobsters, shrimp and crabs.
For example, a species of common freshwater shrimp called Gammarus fossarum split 25 million years ago into separate lineages that are still alive today.
But another influential inventory, called the Clements Checklist of Birds of the World, carves off the barn owls that live on an Indian Ocean island chain as their own species, Tyto deroepstorffi.
The method — which Dr. Wells calls a “rough and ready” triage in our age of extinctions — may make it possible for his team to describe more than 100 new species of plants each year.
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England is launching a biodiversity credit scheme this week that attempts to force all new road and housebuilding projects to benefit nature, rather than damage it.
Sophus zu Ermgassen, an ecological economist from the University of Oxford, said England’s scheme is “world-leading in its scope” in that it addresses all new construction, and covers all natural habitats.
“Demand for biodiversity credits, or offsets, is really limited unless there is some sort of fundamental driver,” zu Ermgassen said, adding that having a mandatory market for all developers helps these things scale up and draw in more investment and activity than they would otherwise.
Zu Ermgassen was part of a study that found that more than a quarter of BNG units are at risk of leading to no tangible increases in biodiversity because there is no monitoring system in place.
Much of the off-site habitat restoration demanded by the scheme – including the creation and protection of wetlands, wildflower meadows or woodlands – is expected to happen on farmland.
Ben Taylor, the manager of Iford Estate farm near Lewes in East Sussex, said betting on this emerging market is “crystal ball stuff”, with many farmers hesitant to take the financial risk.
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