May 25, 2025 • 18 mins
A new Jurassic World movie is right around the corner, taking us back to the world where dinosaurs have been brought back from the dead.
But what has been a science fiction concept for decades might be closer to reality.
Colossal Biosciences claims it’s “successfully de-extincted" the dire wolf, a species that ceased to exist around 10,000 years ago.
The biotech company, which is backed by big name investors and celebrities alike, has a goal to bring back the likes of the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, the northern white rhino, and the dodo.
But, if it's successful, is it right? Should we let nature take its course? And what would bringing back a species that disappeared thousands of years ago do to our world as we know it today?
Today on The Front Page, University of Otago Department of Zoology Associate Professor Nic Rawlence joins us to discuss the ethical dilemma we now face.
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You can read more about this and other stories in the New Zealand Herald, online at nzherald.co.nz, or tune in to news bulletins across the NZME network.
Host: Chelsea Daniels
Sound Engineer/Producer: Richard Martin
Producer: Ethan Sills
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Kyotra. I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page,
a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. A
new Jurassic World movie is right around the corner, taking
us back to a world where dinosaurs have been brought
back from the dead. But what has been a science
fiction concept for decades now might be closer to reality.
(00:30):
Colossal Biosciences claims it successfully de extincted the dire wolf,
a species that has ceased to exist for around ten
thousand years. The biotech company, which is backed by big
name investors and celebrities alike, has a goal to bring
back the likes of the wooly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger,
the Northern white rhino, and the dodo. But even if
(00:53):
it is successful, is it right? Should we let nature
take its course? And what would bringing back a specie
that disappeared thousands of years ago do to our world
as we know it today? Today on the front Page,
University of Otago Department of Zoology Associate Professor Nick Rawleans
is with us to discuss the ethical dilemma we now face.
(01:21):
So Nick, first off, what is all of this de
extinction chat and where did this concept come from?
Speaker 2 (01:28):
The extinction is the ability by scientists to bring animals
back from the dead, back from extinction, and it was
very much similar to like Jurassic Park. Originally people wanted
to do de extinction using cloning, so very much like
what happened with Dolly the Sheep. But to clone an
(01:51):
animal you need really high quality DNA. The problem with
a lot of extinct animals, the DNA is not high quality.
It's fragmented, it's chemically modified, it's been degraded. So it's
like if you took the Auckland Yellow Pages, which is
two volumes and very thick, and putted in a wood
fired pizza of an overnight, it comes out shards, crumbs, dust.
(02:13):
So to the extinct animals, scientists are using genetic modification.
They're using an enzyme called crisper, which acts like scissors
where you can chop out pieces of DNA and insert
new pieces of DNA. So with the die wolf, what
they do is they sequence the genome of the extinct
(02:33):
die wolf, compared it to a close relative, the gray wolf,
and worked out where all the differences occurred, and then
they chopped out the DNA out of the gray wolf
and inserted the DNA of the die wolf to create
a genetically modified hybrid. They argue, that's the thing called
functional de extinction. Like the famous quote, if it walks
like a duck, talks like a duck, and quacks like
(02:55):
a duck, it's a.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Duck, right. So that's why we're hearing about that company
at Colossal bio Tho Sciences. They're behind these efforts to
resurrect things like the wooly mammoth, the dough Dough, and
most recently, like you said, the rebirth of the dire wolf,
the ones we saw running around in Game of Thrones.
But they're saying the world's first successfully de extincted animal,
Is it really though?
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Short answer, no, The technology they have developed is stunning
and will have very real world conservation benefits, but it's
not de extinction. This is a genetically modified designer gray wolf.
These die wolves are more close related to gray wolves
than they are to the extinct die wolves. And if
(03:39):
you think of all the individual DNA letters in a genome,
which are millions and millions of them, they've only done
twenty modifications to that genome. It's an infantistionally small amount
of modifications. But if we think of functional de extinction,
all they've got is something that looks like a die wolf.
They have no idea yet where that behaves like a
(04:01):
die wolf or if it talks like a die wolf,
can it actually fill the role of a die wolf
in the ecosystem, So it's not the extinction.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Peter Jackson from Lord of the Rings was actually one
of our investors. Where I was sitting in Peter's house
with he and his partner friend, and I was like,
you know, I showed him the video of them howling.
He started tearing up. He goes, this is the first
time I hear a darwolf or anyone's heard a darwolf
in ten thousand year started well, he like he like
physically emotionally got chills and started crying.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
So the company's chief animal officer said, the aim isn't
for a zoo or amusement park Alah Island Nubla from
Jurassic Park, but to reintroduce lost species back into the
habitats they once occupied. But if I remember from my
Jurassic Park studies correctly, didn't one of the plant dine
I get sick from eating something that it shouldn't.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Have, Yeah, it did. The triceratops got sick from eating
a plant that hadn't been around when it lived teens
of millions of years ago. And this is one of
the things is if you're trying to say de extinct
the die wolf, it went extinct thirteen thousand years ago.
The ecosystem that it was part of no longer exists.
If you try to extinct de mooa New Zealand's only
(05:24):
got twenty five percent forest cover. At the time of
human arrival, it was eighty percent forest cover. And we've
lost entire ecosystems that have no analogue. So Central Otago,
for example, used to be covered in lancewood and kofi,
which is very weird to think of, but there's no
analog of that anywhere. So you haven't got the ecosystems
for these animals to go back into. A lot of
(05:46):
the ecosystems are being highly highly modified. They're full of predators.
But also if you are going to introduce animals into
an ecosystem, you need them to be genetically healthy, not
in bread like a royal family. I think Tutan Karma
married his sister the Habsburgs out of Europe or even
Queen Victoria married her cousin. For a population to be
(06:07):
genetically healthy, you need at least five hundred individuals, which
is a very tall order.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Indeed, are there ethical concerns though, around the idea of
just letting nature take its course. A lot of species
were driven to extinction by humans, especially in New Zealand,
and we'll touch on that in a moment. But what
(06:33):
about those animals that just lost the fight against the
test of time.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
I guess if the ecosystem was still around, there would
be an argument for reintroducing these animals, and that and
wouldn't be the defining argument, would be a argument. But
if you're going to introduce these animals, you've got to
think about will they be able to cope with the
new world that they find themselves in. They're going to
require a whole lot of conservation for them to survive
(06:58):
in this new ecosystem. Who's going to pay for all
that conservation, Who's going to pay for all that predator control?
And in an age of stretch budgets, where is that
money going to come from? So you've got this real
danger of what you call opportunity costs. So if you're
trying to conserve a de extincted moa, for example, then
that's probably going to pull funding away from other endangered
(07:20):
species that are worthy of conservation, like takahe or carcapo
or the southern dottrial, and that could actually lead to
their extinction unless you can convince Colossal to pay for
the ongoing conservation of these de extinctive species and perpetuity,
which I very much doubt. But you've also got issues
of well, maybe this de extincted species is too successful
in the new ecosystem and becomes a pest. So then
(07:42):
how do you control this? Do you have to eradicate it,
do you have to a hunt it? Do you have
to keep it to low level? So you've got a
whole lot of ethical considerations of just releasing back into
the ecosystem.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
Yeah, but you're scientists. We're so preoccupied with whether or
not they could they just dont.
Speaker 5 (07:58):
Thinkcause they should. Condos. Condos are on the verge of
extinction virst. You could not know if I was to
create a flock of condos on this island, you wouldn't
have anything to.
Speaker 4 (08:09):
Say, Hold on, this is some species that was obliterated
by deforestation or the building of a dam, dinosaurs had
their shot, and nature selected them for extinction.
Speaker 6 (08:21):
Well, the question is, how can you know anything about
an extinct ecosystem, and therefore, how could you ever assume
that you can control it.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
You have plants in this building that are poisonous.
Speaker 4 (08:31):
You pick them because they look good, But these are
aggressive living things that have no idea what centry they're in,
and they'll defend themselves violently if necessary.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
Dinosaurs and man, two species separated by sixty five million
years of evolution, have just been suddenly throwing back into
the next together. How can we possibly have the slightest
idea of what to expect.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Yeah, and we think about extinction in New Zealand. Like
I said, mankind is to blame for pretty much all
of it. Right, These ground dwelling, flightless birds who lived
millions of years being able to hop about with no predators,
that were doomed once man and the rats and the
invasive species came in and stepped foot on this land. So,
in a sense, do we have a responsibility to give
them another chance?
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Wherever humans turn up in the world, extinctions always follow.
It's inevitable. And we know the extinctions in New Zealand
occurred at a time of stable climate. I think we
have so many endangered species that are worthy of conservation
that are crying out for conservation money that de extincting
these animals is going to take money away from conserving them.
(09:40):
So by bringing them back, you're probably dooming others to extinction.
We should use the money to conserve what we've got left,
but also use the technology that has been developed by
companies like Colossal to conserve animals. So this enzyme that
acts like scissors crisper that I was talking about, is
you could use that to reintroduce lost genety variation back
(10:01):
into cacopo or tarka hate so that they have the
evolutionary potential to respond to ongoing climate change or diseases
like in Cacopo you've got aspergillosis, lung fungus, or crusty bump.
So we could use that technology to help what we've got,
rather than in my view as saging human guilt for
(10:22):
causing extinctions.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Yeah, because I'm looking at this Colossal and I mean
I'm seeing the headlines. They did a wooly mammoth mouse
that had characteristics of a wooly mammoth they've brought back,
well brought back in quotation marks the dire wolf. I mean,
is there really any point in bringing back these animals
rather than it's just like cool that we can.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
I don't think there's a point bringing them back. It's like, yes,
there are some arguments that these animals may have key
roles to play in the ecosystem, like the New Zealand
forests haven't realized the mile has gone extinct. There are
certain pollination and seed dispersal mechanism and plants that relied
on birds that are no longer here. And if you
(11:04):
think of mammos, they trample Siberian created the mammos step
which helps sequesta carbon. Those are arguments to bring them back.
But on the flip side, how many hundreds of means
of dollars are going to have to spin to bring
back enough mammos to trample Siberia. It won't be five
hundred mamos, It's probably going to be thousands of mammos.
I think the money's better spent elsewhere. But trying to
(11:27):
get celebrities or philanthropists people with money to invest in conservation.
Sometimes conservation can be sexy, like tarka hae or carcapot.
But often the non sexy species are the ones that
are just as highly endangered, and trying to get money
is a lot easier if people are investing in something
akin to Jurassic.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Park and something cute and cuddly like a direwolf. What
is an unsexy species you think deserves a bit of
the spotlight.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
In New Zealand, shags, the Targo shag, Fovo shag, endangered
shags have been persecuted for decades. If we think of
the spotted shag and hierarchy golf, it's genetically unique. It
used to be spread throughout hierarchy golf, that the harbors
all around Auckland, wy Cato and up into Northland, and
now it's on two or three islands in hierarchy golf
(12:17):
and highly endangered. And yet most people, unless you're a
person who likes birds, don't tend to like shags.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
If we were to start having a conversation about reintroducing,
say the Whuyah, is it important to consult with Ewei.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Most definitely so. Mari are the indigenous people of New Zealand,
and under Article two of Tatarity, the Treaty of Whitangy
and the Mari version. Mari have rights over New Zealand
floor and fauna. And this is also the basis of
the Y two six two claim, so the White Tangy
two six to two claim which says that Mari have
(12:52):
intellectual property rights over New Zealand flaor and fauna. But
we need to engage with Mari any we partners, were
all all on this journey together, and all the engagement
that our lab has done up and down the motor
up and down the country. Is Mari a dead set
against the extinction for a lot of the reasons that
I've talked about, but also for others because there are
(13:17):
real fears for biopiracy or bioprospecting or these companies overseas.
Company is going to trademark these de extinct creatures. And
so if colossals say the extinct to the moa, who
owns the moa? Is it colossal who sunk hundreds of
means of dollars into it? Is it the people of
New Zealand? Is it the ewe who's bones the moa
(13:39):
came from that got de extinct? And who's going to
pay for ongoing conservation.
Speaker 6 (13:45):
Imagine a Jenga tower that's made out of millions of
blocks that are constantly moving and responding to each other,
and if you take it a big one, there will
not be time for the blocks to react to each other,
and the ecosystem make allapse. And so you want to
slot one real quick. And in that case, what you
could do is that you wouldn't have to grab the
(14:05):
existing animal that went extinct. You could create an animal
that serves that same niche that is close enough to
that blob that you can pop it in there and
then the ecosystem will recover. And that's why they're making
the case that these wolves are a de extinction, because
theoretically they might be dire wolf shaped enough that they
(14:26):
would slot into the dire wolf shaped hall left behind
by the actual dire wolves that went extinct.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
I guess, how can we make sure that this kind
of gene editing stays in the conservation realm and it
doesn't evolve into, you know, billionaires buying their kids half
dire wolf half Siberian tiger pups for their birthday.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
I think there needs to be international laws and guidelines,
which becomes quite hard in New Zealand. We've had for
many years the ban on genetic mortification, which the current
government has said they will consider lifting, and we need
a conversation as a country about how we move forward,
(15:09):
how target to fenua, how Mari are involved with that,
because they're currently being shut out of that based on
the draft bill that's been released. But we need to
have these conversations. So New Zealand it will be very
easy to regulate how this is done and so you
can control how it's used, specially for conservation or for
(15:30):
pest eradication for example. The problem with the extinction is
in the eighteen hundreds, museums around the world wanted a
lot of stuff that was in New Zealand museum collection,
so there was a lot of trade. Is say a
museum here, well, we want a Siberian tiger, or we
want an elephant, or we want a Falkland's wolf, we
will trade you for moa bones or other extinct New
(15:50):
Zealand animals, and so museums all around the world there
are the remains of New Zealand's extinct birds and there
is nothing to stop coloss or any the Extinction company
from going to these overseas museums, getting the mole bones
and doing the extinction.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
Is this all just a hop, skip and a jump
away from bringing back all kinds of species? Like have
we not learned anything from Jurassic Park? Like how realistic
is it that Jurassic Park? I mean, if we're having
this conversation now, what about in two hundred years scholars
are listening to this podcast episode and thinking, God, I
wish we did something then, because this Tyrannosaurus Rex is
(16:30):
just ruining downtown Auckland.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
I would like to think in two hundred years we
will have learned the lessons of Jurassic Park. So we
can't bring dinosaurs back to life, let them run and
mark and eat lawyers like in the movie. Ancient DNA
only lasts about one million to two million years under
ideal permafrost conditions like in the Siberian permafrost, So we
(16:52):
can't get back to dinosaurs. But I think there might
be things in two hundred years of what Colossal and
other company might say is a de extinct creature. But
whether you would call it success, I'm not so convinced
by because there's still there's still a lot of hurdles.
So for example, colossal wants to bring back the thylacine
or the Tasmanian tiger. Its closest relative is a small
(17:16):
little mussupial called the dun up, and there are teens
of means of years different from each other. You can't
put a thylacine fertilized egg to be brought up to
term in a dunn up. The dunn up would explode,
So you have to develop artificial wounds. So there's a
whole lot of technological leaps and bounds that need to occur.
But the proof and the potting will be if these
(17:38):
animals do get de extincted and they get released back
into the wild and there are no unintended consequences, whether
they actually fill the role what used to be here
that are not.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Convinced of Thanks for joining us, Nick, No worries, pleasure.
That's it for this episode of The Front Page. You
can read more about today's story, Worries and extensive news
coverage at enzedherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page
is produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is
(18:09):
also a sound engineer. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to the
Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts,
and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.
Kyotra. I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page,
a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. A
new Jurassic World movie is right around the corner, taking
us back to a world where dinosaurs have been brought
back from the dead. But what has been a science
fiction concept for decades now might be closer to reality.
(00:30):
Colossal Biosciences claims it successfully de extincted the dire wolf,
a species that has ceased to exist for around ten
thousand years. The biotech company, which is backed by big
name investors and celebrities alike, has a goal to bring
back the likes of the wooly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger,
the Northern white rhino, and the dodo. But even if
(00:53):
it is successful, is it right? Should we let nature
take its course? And what would bringing back a specie
that disappeared thousands of years ago do to our world
as we know it today? Today on the front Page,
University of Otago Department of Zoology Associate Professor Nick Rawleans
is with us to discuss the ethical dilemma we now face.
(01:21):
So Nick, first off, what is all of this de
extinction chat and where did this concept come from?
Speaker 2 (01:28):
The extinction is the ability by scientists to bring animals
back from the dead, back from extinction, and it was
very much similar to like Jurassic Park. Originally people wanted
to do de extinction using cloning, so very much like
what happened with Dolly the Sheep. But to clone an
(01:51):
animal you need really high quality DNA. The problem with
a lot of extinct animals, the DNA is not high quality.
It's fragmented, it's chemically modified, it's been degraded. So it's
like if you took the Auckland Yellow Pages, which is
two volumes and very thick, and putted in a wood
fired pizza of an overnight, it comes out shards, crumbs, dust.
(02:13):
So to the extinct animals, scientists are using genetic modification.
They're using an enzyme called crisper, which acts like scissors
where you can chop out pieces of DNA and insert
new pieces of DNA. So with the die wolf, what
they do is they sequence the genome of the extinct
(02:33):
die wolf, compared it to a close relative, the gray wolf,
and worked out where all the differences occurred, and then
they chopped out the DNA out of the gray wolf
and inserted the DNA of the die wolf to create
a genetically modified hybrid. They argue, that's the thing called
functional de extinction. Like the famous quote, if it walks
like a duck, talks like a duck, and quacks like
(02:55):
a duck, it's a.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Duck, right. So that's why we're hearing about that company
at Colossal bio Tho Sciences. They're behind these efforts to
resurrect things like the wooly mammoth, the dough Dough, and
most recently, like you said, the rebirth of the dire wolf,
the ones we saw running around in Game of Thrones.
But they're saying the world's first successfully de extincted animal,
Is it really though?
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Short answer, no, The technology they have developed is stunning
and will have very real world conservation benefits, but it's
not de extinction. This is a genetically modified designer gray wolf.
These die wolves are more close related to gray wolves
than they are to the extinct die wolves. And if
(03:39):
you think of all the individual DNA letters in a genome,
which are millions and millions of them, they've only done
twenty modifications to that genome. It's an infantistionally small amount
of modifications. But if we think of functional de extinction,
all they've got is something that looks like a die wolf.
They have no idea yet where that behaves like a
(04:01):
die wolf or if it talks like a die wolf,
can it actually fill the role of a die wolf
in the ecosystem, So it's not the extinction.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Peter Jackson from Lord of the Rings was actually one
of our investors. Where I was sitting in Peter's house
with he and his partner friend, and I was like,
you know, I showed him the video of them howling.
He started tearing up. He goes, this is the first
time I hear a darwolf or anyone's heard a darwolf
in ten thousand year started well, he like he like
physically emotionally got chills and started crying.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
So the company's chief animal officer said, the aim isn't
for a zoo or amusement park Alah Island Nubla from
Jurassic Park, but to reintroduce lost species back into the
habitats they once occupied. But if I remember from my
Jurassic Park studies correctly, didn't one of the plant dine
I get sick from eating something that it shouldn't.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Have, Yeah, it did. The triceratops got sick from eating
a plant that hadn't been around when it lived teens
of millions of years ago. And this is one of
the things is if you're trying to say de extinct
the die wolf, it went extinct thirteen thousand years ago.
The ecosystem that it was part of no longer exists.
If you try to extinct de mooa New Zealand's only
(05:24):
got twenty five percent forest cover. At the time of
human arrival, it was eighty percent forest cover. And we've
lost entire ecosystems that have no analogue. So Central Otago,
for example, used to be covered in lancewood and kofi,
which is very weird to think of, but there's no
analog of that anywhere. So you haven't got the ecosystems
for these animals to go back into. A lot of
(05:46):
the ecosystems are being highly highly modified. They're full of predators.
But also if you are going to introduce animals into
an ecosystem, you need them to be genetically healthy, not
in bread like a royal family. I think Tutan Karma
married his sister the Habsburgs out of Europe or even
Queen Victoria married her cousin. For a population to be
(06:07):
genetically healthy, you need at least five hundred individuals, which
is a very tall order.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Indeed, are there ethical concerns though, around the idea of
just letting nature take its course. A lot of species
were driven to extinction by humans, especially in New Zealand,
and we'll touch on that in a moment. But what
(06:33):
about those animals that just lost the fight against the
test of time.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
I guess if the ecosystem was still around, there would
be an argument for reintroducing these animals, and that and
wouldn't be the defining argument, would be a argument. But
if you're going to introduce these animals, you've got to
think about will they be able to cope with the
new world that they find themselves in. They're going to
require a whole lot of conservation for them to survive
(06:58):
in this new ecosystem. Who's going to pay for all
that conservation, Who's going to pay for all that predator control?
And in an age of stretch budgets, where is that
money going to come from? So you've got this real
danger of what you call opportunity costs. So if you're
trying to conserve a de extincted moa, for example, then
that's probably going to pull funding away from other endangered
(07:20):
species that are worthy of conservation, like takahe or carcapo
or the southern dottrial, and that could actually lead to
their extinction unless you can convince Colossal to pay for
the ongoing conservation of these de extinctive species and perpetuity,
which I very much doubt. But you've also got issues
of well, maybe this de extincted species is too successful
in the new ecosystem and becomes a pest. So then
(07:42):
how do you control this? Do you have to eradicate it,
do you have to a hunt it? Do you have
to keep it to low level? So you've got a
whole lot of ethical considerations of just releasing back into
the ecosystem.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
Yeah, but you're scientists. We're so preoccupied with whether or
not they could they just dont.
Speaker 5 (07:58):
Thinkcause they should. Condos. Condos are on the verge of
extinction virst. You could not know if I was to
create a flock of condos on this island, you wouldn't
have anything to.
Speaker 4 (08:09):
Say, Hold on, this is some species that was obliterated
by deforestation or the building of a dam, dinosaurs had
their shot, and nature selected them for extinction.
Speaker 6 (08:21):
Well, the question is, how can you know anything about
an extinct ecosystem, and therefore, how could you ever assume
that you can control it.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
You have plants in this building that are poisonous.
Speaker 4 (08:31):
You pick them because they look good, But these are
aggressive living things that have no idea what centry they're in,
and they'll defend themselves violently if necessary.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
Dinosaurs and man, two species separated by sixty five million
years of evolution, have just been suddenly throwing back into
the next together. How can we possibly have the slightest
idea of what to expect.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Yeah, and we think about extinction in New Zealand. Like
I said, mankind is to blame for pretty much all
of it. Right, These ground dwelling, flightless birds who lived
millions of years being able to hop about with no predators,
that were doomed once man and the rats and the
invasive species came in and stepped foot on this land. So,
in a sense, do we have a responsibility to give
them another chance?
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Wherever humans turn up in the world, extinctions always follow.
It's inevitable. And we know the extinctions in New Zealand
occurred at a time of stable climate. I think we
have so many endangered species that are worthy of conservation
that are crying out for conservation money that de extincting
these animals is going to take money away from conserving them.
(09:40):
So by bringing them back, you're probably dooming others to extinction.
We should use the money to conserve what we've got left,
but also use the technology that has been developed by
companies like Colossal to conserve animals. So this enzyme that
acts like scissors crisper that I was talking about, is
you could use that to reintroduce lost genety variation back
(10:01):
into cacopo or tarka hate so that they have the
evolutionary potential to respond to ongoing climate change or diseases
like in Cacopo you've got aspergillosis, lung fungus, or crusty bump.
So we could use that technology to help what we've got,
rather than in my view as saging human guilt for
(10:22):
causing extinctions.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Yeah, because I'm looking at this Colossal and I mean
I'm seeing the headlines. They did a wooly mammoth mouse
that had characteristics of a wooly mammoth they've brought back,
well brought back in quotation marks the dire wolf. I mean,
is there really any point in bringing back these animals
rather than it's just like cool that we can.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
I don't think there's a point bringing them back. It's like, yes,
there are some arguments that these animals may have key
roles to play in the ecosystem, like the New Zealand
forests haven't realized the mile has gone extinct. There are
certain pollination and seed dispersal mechanism and plants that relied
on birds that are no longer here. And if you
(11:04):
think of mammos, they trample Siberian created the mammos step
which helps sequesta carbon. Those are arguments to bring them back.
But on the flip side, how many hundreds of means
of dollars are going to have to spin to bring
back enough mammos to trample Siberia. It won't be five
hundred mamos, It's probably going to be thousands of mammos.
I think the money's better spent elsewhere. But trying to
(11:27):
get celebrities or philanthropists people with money to invest in conservation.
Sometimes conservation can be sexy, like tarka hae or carcapot.
But often the non sexy species are the ones that
are just as highly endangered, and trying to get money
is a lot easier if people are investing in something
akin to Jurassic.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Park and something cute and cuddly like a direwolf. What
is an unsexy species you think deserves a bit of
the spotlight.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
In New Zealand, shags, the Targo shag, Fovo shag, endangered
shags have been persecuted for decades. If we think of
the spotted shag and hierarchy golf, it's genetically unique. It
used to be spread throughout hierarchy golf, that the harbors
all around Auckland, wy Cato and up into Northland, and
now it's on two or three islands in hierarchy golf
(12:17):
and highly endangered. And yet most people, unless you're a
person who likes birds, don't tend to like shags.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
If we were to start having a conversation about reintroducing,
say the Whuyah, is it important to consult with Ewei.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Most definitely so. Mari are the indigenous people of New Zealand,
and under Article two of Tatarity, the Treaty of Whitangy
and the Mari version. Mari have rights over New Zealand
floor and fauna. And this is also the basis of
the Y two six two claim, so the White Tangy
two six to two claim which says that Mari have
(12:52):
intellectual property rights over New Zealand flaor and fauna. But
we need to engage with Mari any we partners, were
all all on this journey together, and all the engagement
that our lab has done up and down the motor
up and down the country. Is Mari a dead set
against the extinction for a lot of the reasons that
I've talked about, but also for others because there are
(13:17):
real fears for biopiracy or bioprospecting or these companies overseas.
Company is going to trademark these de extinct creatures. And
so if colossals say the extinct to the moa, who
owns the moa? Is it colossal who sunk hundreds of
means of dollars into it? Is it the people of
New Zealand? Is it the ewe who's bones the moa
(13:39):
came from that got de extinct? And who's going to
pay for ongoing conservation.
Speaker 6 (13:45):
Imagine a Jenga tower that's made out of millions of
blocks that are constantly moving and responding to each other,
and if you take it a big one, there will
not be time for the blocks to react to each other,
and the ecosystem make allapse. And so you want to
slot one real quick. And in that case, what you
could do is that you wouldn't have to grab the
(14:05):
existing animal that went extinct. You could create an animal
that serves that same niche that is close enough to
that blob that you can pop it in there and
then the ecosystem will recover. And that's why they're making
the case that these wolves are a de extinction, because
theoretically they might be dire wolf shaped enough that they
(14:26):
would slot into the dire wolf shaped hall left behind
by the actual dire wolves that went extinct.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
I guess, how can we make sure that this kind
of gene editing stays in the conservation realm and it
doesn't evolve into, you know, billionaires buying their kids half
dire wolf half Siberian tiger pups for their birthday.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
I think there needs to be international laws and guidelines,
which becomes quite hard in New Zealand. We've had for
many years the ban on genetic mortification, which the current
government has said they will consider lifting, and we need
a conversation as a country about how we move forward,
(15:09):
how target to fenua, how Mari are involved with that,
because they're currently being shut out of that based on
the draft bill that's been released. But we need to
have these conversations. So New Zealand it will be very
easy to regulate how this is done and so you
can control how it's used, specially for conservation or for
(15:30):
pest eradication for example. The problem with the extinction is
in the eighteen hundreds, museums around the world wanted a
lot of stuff that was in New Zealand museum collection,
so there was a lot of trade. Is say a
museum here, well, we want a Siberian tiger, or we
want an elephant, or we want a Falkland's wolf, we
will trade you for moa bones or other extinct New
(15:50):
Zealand animals, and so museums all around the world there
are the remains of New Zealand's extinct birds and there
is nothing to stop coloss or any the Extinction company
from going to these overseas museums, getting the mole bones
and doing the extinction.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
Is this all just a hop, skip and a jump
away from bringing back all kinds of species? Like have
we not learned anything from Jurassic Park? Like how realistic
is it that Jurassic Park? I mean, if we're having
this conversation now, what about in two hundred years scholars
are listening to this podcast episode and thinking, God, I
wish we did something then, because this Tyrannosaurus Rex is
(16:30):
just ruining downtown Auckland.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
I would like to think in two hundred years we
will have learned the lessons of Jurassic Park. So we
can't bring dinosaurs back to life, let them run and
mark and eat lawyers like in the movie. Ancient DNA
only lasts about one million to two million years under
ideal permafrost conditions like in the Siberian permafrost, So we
(16:52):
can't get back to dinosaurs. But I think there might
be things in two hundred years of what Colossal and
other company might say is a de extinct creature. But
whether you would call it success, I'm not so convinced
by because there's still there's still a lot of hurdles.
So for example, colossal wants to bring back the thylacine
or the Tasmanian tiger. Its closest relative is a small
(17:16):
little mussupial called the dun up, and there are teens
of means of years different from each other. You can't
put a thylacine fertilized egg to be brought up to
term in a dunn up. The dunn up would explode,
So you have to develop artificial wounds. So there's a
whole lot of technological leaps and bounds that need to occur.
But the proof and the potting will be if these
(17:38):
animals do get de extincted and they get released back
into the wild and there are no unintended consequences, whether
they actually fill the role what used to be here
that are not.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Convinced of Thanks for joining us, Nick, No worries, pleasure.
That's it for this episode of The Front Page. You
can read more about today's story, Worries and extensive news
coverage at enzedherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page
is produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is
(18:09):
also a sound engineer. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to the
Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts,
and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.
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