The last mammoths to walk the Earth did not succumb to inbreeding after hundreds of generations, despite being stuck on a remote island off the coast of Siberia.
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Colossal Biosciences, which calls itself “the world’s first de-extinction company,” has created stem cells it thinks will hasten the company’s marquee goal of resurrecting the woolly mammoth. The team’s research describing the accomplishment will be hosted on the preprint server bioRxiv.
The U.S. is officially saying goodbye to 21 species that have been feared gone for years. These animals, which include many birds and marine mammals, have been delisted from the Endangered Species Act because they are now declared extinct, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said this week.
The last known thylacine—the largest marsupial carnivore in recent times—died in Tasmania’s Beaumaris Zoo in 1936.
Humankind struggled to survive during a 100,000 year period during the early Pleistocene, according to researchers who used a computer model to discover a severe population bottleneck in our species’ ancient past.
Jae C. Hong/AP Photo
Henry Nicholls/Reuters
Extinction is an age-old song, one played so many times in Earth’s history that we regularly discover new species that died out in the ancient past. But only in the last century have humans generally been aware of the final member of a species, typically because the creature is held in captivity.