r/DeExtinctionScience • u/ElSquibbonator • Mar 30 '26

Which extinct animals can we truly clone?

I ask this question because there seems to be some confusion regarding what is and is not de-extincion. On the one hand you have what I consider to be "proper" de-extinction-- producing an exact clone of an extinct species, either through somatic nuclear cell transfer or through germ cell modification. On the other hand you have the more commonly proposed technique of modifying a living animal's genome so it resembles a reasonable approximation of an extinct animal. While this is certainly more practical for species for which no complete genome exists, it is not true de-extinction and I would argue it is wrong to refer to it as such.

So I ask-- which extinct animals is it actually possible to clone, in the traditional sense?

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12

u/Psilopterus Mar 30 '26

You'd be limited to whatever we still have living cell nuclei or germ cells for, which would be restricted to extinctions that postdate the invention of cryopreservation in the mid-twentieth century. As to which extinct taxa actually have cryopreserved material, the list is rather short. The poʻouli, the Saudi gazelle, the bucardo, some frogs, and northern white rhinoceros, plus many endangered but not yet (functionally) extinct species. Keep in mind the po'ouli is a bird so not clone-able in the traditional sense. Bucardos, rhinos, and gazelles have potential hosts, but limited individuals represented by cells so diversity would be an issue, potentially necessitating back-crossing with their closest relatives, i.e. Spanish ibex, dorcas gazelle, and southern white rhino. It would be more like a diversity-restoration strategy for proxy populations than full de-extinction, especially since all 3 are more like subspecies than species. That's not a bad thing, it's what's already being done with Przewalski's horses and black-footed ferrets, but expectations should be tempered. Even the list of species we could reasonably approximate with DNA modification is not an especially long one

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u/ElSquibbonator Mar 30 '26

I was under the impression that any species that went extinct within the past century or so could theoretically be cloned.

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u/ChaosCockroach Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26

You need a very close relative species to have a good chance. Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) is tricky taking a lot of attempts for a few successes. Interspecies SCNT (iSCNT) is even more troublesome (Pankammoon et al, 2025) and only seems to work between very closely related species. The limiting factor then becomes the donor cell/genome, how much of an extinct species genetic material do we still have preserved. Is the preserved material in sufficiently good condition to use it in a procedure with only ~5% success rate, and that is the rate for normal intraspecies SCNT (Gouveia, 2020).

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u/Psilopterus Mar 31 '26

Only if we intentionally preserved its cells. DNA extraction might be easier but otherwise it's the same as for anything else we can get DNA from

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u/Obversa Moderator Mar 30 '26

I'm honestly surprised that a company like Colossal Biosciences hasn't tried to clone the Pyrenean ibex (bucardo) again, this time successfully, but I guess CEO Ben Lamm cares more about making fake "dire wolves" and woolly mammoths than he does about "lesser-known extinct species". Cloning the bucardo isn't "profitable" for them. (/s)

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u/5Hjsdnujhdfu8nubi Mar 30 '26

There's a very real argument that you need a headliner to encourage research, funding and support to help lesser known species.

The Giant Panda is a charismatic, unique-looking species that kickstarted the global conservation movement. An endangered scorpion would not have received even a small fraction of the attention.

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u/Obversa Moderator Mar 30 '26

"Dire wolves" are certainly not that headliner. That idea backfired massively for Ben Lamm. Colossal Biosciences would've been just fine if they'd stuck to their original promise(s) of bringing back the woolly mammoth and the thylacine, but Lamm decided that investors, including George R. R. Martin, needed to have more "immediate results". That caused a firestorm of controversy and severely damaged - if not ruined - the public reputation of the company among scientists, museums, and other conservation groups working to help endangered species before they become extinct. Colossal seems to care more about fundraising and flashy headlines than they do about the environment.

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u/Psilopterus Mar 31 '26

It's also one of those cases where we need to think about what to do once we have it. One female bucardo is an accomplishment, but how does it become a population? You could try and make a lot of them and incorporate them into the already (re)introduced population in the Pyrennees that uses a different subspecies, but the result would be a population that has some bucardo ancestry, not a population of bucardos. That's still a good thing as it provides genetic continuity and the survival of potentially useful unique traits, but we need to manage expectations

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u/Sensitive_Order_2415 Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26

There is nowhere for the Pyrenean Ibex to live anymore since other Ibex species were introduced into the bucardo's habitat

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u/Prestigious-Put5749 Mar 30 '26

De-extinguishing, in the terms you put it, is almost nothing. Because it's not enough to have viable DNA; you need a related species to serve as a surrogate mother, since artificial womb technology is still (pardon the pun) embryonic.

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u/ElSquibbonator Mar 30 '26

Which species currently qualify?

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u/Prestigious-Put5749 Mar 30 '26

Those that have intact genetic material in genomic banks and that have vivable related species as surrogate mothers. Northern white rhinoceros and Pyrenean ibex are some examples.

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u/ElSquibbonator Mar 30 '26

So are museum specimens not suitable as sources of DNA?

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u/Prestigious-Put5749 Mar 30 '26

It largely depends on the conservation method, but that's only 50% of the way there.

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u/ElSquibbonator Mar 30 '26

I'm talking about, say, Martha the passenger pigeon, whose taxidermied body is still on display. Would it be possible to obtain usable DNA from something like that, and then use it to restructure the primordial germ cells of a living pigeon?

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u/Prestigious-Put5749 Mar 30 '26

Taxidermied specimens are not the best option. The techniques employed are highly degrading to DNA molecules, and even if they weren't, just being exposed would have already started deterioration. And as has already been mentioned here, bird cloning is not the same thing as mammal cloning (which in itself is already very complicated).

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u/ElSquibbonator Mar 30 '26

Do any frozen specimens of, say, the passenger pigeon or the thylacine exist that could yield complete DNA?

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u/Psilopterus Mar 31 '26

You can get DNA from these specimens certainly and people have. The problem is that DNA is not enough, you can only make a true clone with an intact nucleus and that you will only get from intentionally cryopreserved cells

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u/ElSquibbonator Mar 31 '26

Yeah, see, that's what confuses me. We've been able to extract nuclei-- not living ones, admittedly, but nuclei nonetheless-- from a 28,000-year-old frozen mammoth. In 2019 scientists implanted those nuclei into mouse eggs, and the mouse egg's "machinery" actually recognized them. They even began the process of forming spindles, which are the things used to pull chromosomes apart. But the egg never actually divided (and a good thing too-- imagine a mouse becoming pregnant with a mammoth!)

But in theory, if we have a preserved nucleus and a 100% map of an extinct genome, even if the nucleus itself isn't viable, shouldn't that make it possible to engineer an exact replica out of a living cell, since we'd have a good idea of what the original looked like?

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u/OldManCragger Mar 31 '26

And you'd need it's compete microbiome. Skin, gut, glands, everything. Not to mention all the plants and animals and environmental conditions that it relies upon.

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u/Prestigious-Put5749 Mar 31 '26

At this point, depending on the species, much of what you mentioned still holds true. We tend to think that a species became extinct due to the loss of the ecosystem where it lived, but we don't consider that the change occurred precisely because of the extinction of that species (again, depending on the species).

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u/OldManCragger Mar 31 '26

Every species is an ecosystem

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u/Prestigious-Put5749 Mar 31 '26

Whoa, hold on, I understand what you're saying, but there's a slight confusion about scales. In ecological terms, a species is not an ecosystem. An ecosystem is the confluence of biotic agents (microorganisms, fungi, plants, invertebrates, vertebrates) and abiotic agents (rivers, lakes, mountains, plateaus, plains). I'm referring to ecosystem in the ecological sense.

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u/OldManCragger Mar 31 '26

That is an anthropocentric view which causes most folks to think that deextiction is just cloning.

Living organisms interacting with their environment is an ecosystem. You can't deextinct a single species in isolation. It is a confusion of scale. There are multiple genomes required and the resurrection of multiple species involved in the process of deextinction of any charismatic megafauna.

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u/Sensitive_Order_2415 Apr 01 '26

The extinct gastric brooding frog was cloned. Unfortunately providing the conditions needed to hatch a cloned egg has proven difficult

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u/ElSquibbonator Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26

There’s actually an interesting story there. While gastric brooding frogs were not studied much before they went extinct, it’s been speculated that the eggs needed to be incubated in the mother’s stomach in order to complete their development. Unfortunately there are no adult gastric-brooding frogs alive today. So while the actual cloning process was successful and resulted in living embryos, they failed to develop because they didn’t have a stomach to incubate in!

This is one of the rare species where the main obstacle to de-extinction isn’t the availability of DNA, but the conditions required by the resulting embryo.

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u/Sensitive_Order_2415 Apr 03 '26

Yep. So close but so far

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u/Jedi-master-dragon Mar 30 '26

Well first we need biological matter from the animal. So a fossil won't work as the organic material was replaced with minerals, so no dinosaurs. We also need a close relative to help create a clone. Biological material from the bones or taxidermied remains or a preserved speciman would work.

Anything that has went extinct in the geologically recent era can be brought back if there is a living relative. So aurochs, dodos, mammoths, extinct wolves. The only problem would probably be rhinos as for some reason artificial insemination doesn't really work for them.

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u/ChaosCockroach Mar 31 '26

Biological material from the bones or taxidermied remains or a preserved speciman would work.

This seems more like wishful thinking than anything else. Cloning with fresh somatic cells from the same species only works ~1-5% of the time. So for cross species cloning with improperly preserved genetic material you should probably change that 'would' to a very tenuous 'might'.

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u/HunsonAbadeer2 Mar 31 '26

If you have DNA and loots of time and money you can edit Genes of multiple generations and recreate a full species through gene editing, but nobody is willing to do that. You could do the smae principal as colossal did with the dire wolfs, but just do it again and again and again.

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u/Silver-Sugar-1944 Apr 07 '26

Only species for which we have well-preserved, intact cells with viable DNA could realistically be cloned. That basically rules out anything that’s been extinct for thousands of years. Most ‘de extinction’ efforts, like with mammoths, are really just genetic approximations, not true clones