• Question: would it be possible to bring back extinct species through evolution

    Asked by dobbie to Ed, Katie, Sam, Steve, Vera on 15 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Vera Weisbecker

      Vera Weisbecker answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Not really. It is possible to get similar species through evolution, but never the identical species. For example, the Yangtze River dolphin in China recently went extinct. It is perfectly possible that some other dolphin species finds that the Yangtze river is a great place to live, and adapts to the environment of this river (by evolving a _really_ long snout, for example). It will then probably look like the extinct dolphin and also do exactly the same things, but it won’t be the same species. We call this convergent evolution – similar adaptations evolve from unrelated species.

    • Photo: Sam Tazzyman

      Sam Tazzyman answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      It is very unlikely that species exactly the same as those that are extinct could re-evolve. However, sometimes things that look similar do evolve from separate starting places. This is called “convergent evolution” – an example is the fin on the back of sharks, and the similar-looking fin which was on the back of Icthyosaurs:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icthyosaur

      Icthyosaurs died out with the dinosaurs, and though they look like fish they were actually reptiles that evolved a fin on their back (similar to how dolphins have fins on their backs even though they are mammals).

      What can also happen is that a physical feature of an animal that has been lost through evolution can still hang around in the genes for a while, albeit in much reduced form. An example of this is your tailbone. it’s like a tiny tail, and if for some reason humans with longer tailbones survived better and had more children, then gradually over time humans would re-evolve tails! Of course this is very unlikely to happen in real life.

    • Photo: Katie Marriott

      Katie Marriott answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      I have no idea baout this and Sam and Vera have given some good answers.

      I wish it could happen. I would definitely make a Jurrasic Park type Theme Park!!

    • Photo: Steven Daly

      Steven Daly answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Great answers from Vera and Sam!

      Perhaps in the future we could do something like Jurassic Park, and bring extinct animals back to life by cloning. However it would have to be animal that died recently, because DNA degrades over long time spans.

    • Photo: Ed Morrison

      Ed Morrison answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      No I don’t think so. That’s why it’s so important to prevent species going extinct now.

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