Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson backs plan to do a Jurassic Park on extinct birds Researchers from New Zealand will try to revive extinct birds, with help from Colossal Biosciences and film-maker Sir Peter Jackson. Readers may remember that Colossal Biosciences has created a “woolly” mouse by using genetic information gathered from woolly mammoths and elephants, a feat it hopes will help it to one day re- …
they were thought
Don't we know? They went extinct only a few hundred years ago, after the Maori arrived. They were presumably responsible for their extinction, and would have some oral storytelling about the process of exterminating them.
Though I suppose that while they could estimate the weight pretty well ("two good sized men" or similar) they wouldn't have any frame of reference for their speed other than comparing them to other fast running animals.
Who is going to live in peace and harmony with 12 foot tall dinosaurs that for all we know found human flesh to be delicious? Even the earliest inhabitants of North America tens of thousands of years ago tried to kill anything that might eat them like sabre tooth tigers, cave bears, dire wolves and the like. Would have been nice if they'd left the mammoth alone though, but I suppose feeding your tribe for the whole winter with one kill was a deal too good to pass up!
from the conversation i'm guessing the first egg will never get a chance to hatch, probably sunny side up. This conversation is why there are so many existing animals such as rhinos that are on the verge of extinction just for having horns or other coveted things used for barbaric purposes that may be examples of traditional medical practices but probably have no truth in reality.
Yes, Haast's Eagle
People believe it munched Moa (amongst other things) - hence it being so huge as even young (easier prey) Moa would be quite hefty.
It was massive (for an eagle, probably reached about double the weight of heaviest living eagle) so the comment on no significant predators in the article was technically incorrect (but an eagle generally not what most people regard as a scary predator)
Fossil evidence of moa skeletons indicates that a large raptor was their primary (if not sole) predator. Talon indentations on femurs, for example. Not unlike the Harpy eagle which predates on monkeys today, and their skeletons exhibit similar damage.
New Zealand's relative isolation evolved some very interesting creatures indeed!
then one of these giants could kick your whole house down.
I had forgotten how big these blighters were. I remember as a child on a school outing seeing Moa replica in a Dunedin museum which was pretty big but everything is when you are seven years old. I don't think it was even a Giant Moa but one of the second eleven.
All involved acknowledge bringing the birds back to life may not be possible,
Maybe not at the moment, but the life sciences move at a tremendous rate and future advances may make this scheme possible.
After all, who would have thought a few decades ago that we would be able to map the human genome?
Yeah the genome was mapped.
And then people realised that they probably bet the wrong horse and wonderful new inventions were just a hopeful dream based purely on speculation. "Just flick a single gene and.." translated into "we don't have any idea what we are looking at"
... implied they had "brought the Dire Wolf back to life", but in fact only edited the genes of the Grey Wolf to make it look like an artist's impression of what a Dire Wolf might have looked like?
I'd be somewhat leery of investing in this kind of thing without doing my due diligence. LOTS of due diligence.
The difference between a Moa (extinct 500 years ago) and a Dire Wolf (extinct 13,000 years ago) is considerable. I remember seeing their bones in the muesum as a kid, there are plenty about and I'm sure many have viable DNA.
Also I should note there are lots of islands off the coast of NZ, many of which are already dedicated bird sanctuaries after having successefully eradicated the rats. And Moa can't fly or swim.
A study some years ago - of Moa no less - found that the half-life of DNA is ~521 years. Although the last base pair will probably not degrade for 6.8million years.
So yeah, if you have enough specimens that have been preserved in sympathetic conditions, there's a pretty good chance you could recover a fair chunk of the moa genome.
Whereas 13,000year old dire wolf remains are into very much diminishing returns.
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Colossal Cave Adventure was the game, though apparently Colossal Cavern was the unimaginative name of a real cave that partly inspired it. Presumably named as such because Big Hole was already taken.
They could spend resources for keeping existing species alive through environmental protection stuff.
But nah, let's just pick the obviously easier task where a lot of resourcs will be thrown at.
And when humankind has messed everything up too bad, then just load as much people as possible to SpaceX rocket and start the countdown.
