Extinct Animal That Science Could Bring Back From The Dead

Woolly Mammoth

The woolly mammoth is one of the more popular candidates for resurrection, and for good reason—it might actually work. Although there hasn’t been a living mammoth for about 200,000 years, the fact that they died during an ice age in a region that’s still pretty frozen to this day (modern-day Siberia) means that we’ve been able to dig up whole specimens that are practically still gooey because they were preserved so well.

In 2011, a team of Tokyo-based researchers announced a deadline: They would have a living, breathing woolly mammoth within five years. But while it’s technically possible to clone a mammoth by the normal method—extracting cell nuclei, putting it into an embryo from another species, and implanting the altered embryo into a surrogate mother—the thawed mammoth cells have an annoying habit of dying before a nucleus can be extracted