De-extinction

This might be old news, this one kind of caught my eye. I don't even think it's really news. It's just something I found on Vice. We love Vice, so I thought why not read this one? Taito, we asked the math tutor who posts his lessons on Pornhub. Why? And I was like, yeah, I'd like to know as well. Is it because he wants to make sure everybody is sane? People should be doing math all the time, even while on Pornhub. Exactly, it's because everybody should be doing math constantly.

And among the trove of wild roleplay and bizarre COVID porn, a bespectacled man clad in a sick gray hoodie is an unlikely hit on Pornhub. He's a hit, hey? Scribbling the mathematical equations on a chalkboard and explaining them in the utmost seriousness, the unassuming tutor has carved a niche for himself in the corner of one of the world's largest porn sites without even being remotely sexual. I'm looking at him right now. He is not.

This isn't some next level take on professor roleplay or the nerdy side of rule 34. I don't know what that is. No, we've just stumbled upon a tutor's extremely. Rule 34 is if it exists, somebody has made porn about it. Oh, okay. So like somebody teaching math, somebody probably has made porn. Okay, yeah, that's a good rule. Which they have definitely made porn of a math teacher before. Yeah, no, they definitely have. That's no question.

I didn't know that that was a rule and I didn't know it was definite. I did not know the actual name of it, but one second, I'm going to look at the actual wording to it really quick. I didn't know it was the 34th rule. If it exists, there is porn of it. Rule 34. Okay, I mean, that was always just a given. I didn't know there's rule to it and I want to know the other rules, but I'll look that up on my own time. So no, we've just stumbled upon a tutor's extremely earnest attempt to teach math.

Chun-Yi Chang, 34, who also goes by the stage name Chang-Su is a type of math tutor. I'm sorry, I just for Pornhub and having a stage name, you would have to, I guess, but we also just got his name. So I don't know. At Taiwanese math tutor who runs a porn hub account with over 7000 subscribers, his channel fronted by a cheeky quote, play hard, study hard, quote, slogan contains hundreds of videos of him explaining calculus. What a platform.

His videos have racked up almost 2 million views in total, making him a successful fully closed content creator and a space dominated by nudity. The titles of his videos often carry porn related keywords such as naked, giant breasts, masturbation, 3-7 oral sex. A calculated move to make sure his videos would appear in as many keyword searches as possible, Chang told me.

While he has been posting math tutorials on Pornhub for over a year, he went viral after catching the attention of a Taiwanese news outlet in October. Not sure why they are surfing on Pornhub. Since then, he had been interviewed by international publications and even appeared on a live stream event on Pornhub's official Instagram account earlier this month. Chelsea, to be fair, nobody is going to ask you why were you on Pornhub in the first year.

Because nobody wants to answer that question themselves. So yeah, I think it's good. I think we can end that here. I thought it was interesting that there was someone uploading that there and he thought, how can I get the word of math out? Why Pornhub? It's probably more popular than Facebook, to be honest with you. It's probably not out to lunch on that. Yeah, and let's face it, people are not engaging with math on Facebook. They're engaging with extreme right-wing ideology on Facebook.

It's true. Which seems to be the antithesis of math. So really it's more of a pure place to be posting math tutorials. The intellectuals are on Pornhub. It's true. Well, at least the people who yearn to be intellectuals. That's their fantasy if you will. And at the next place that you find yourself rubbing elbows with someone you might ask if they've ever heard of, where's the stage name again? And then when they say never heard of them, they say, wait, what are you doing on Pornhub?

Yeah, James. I'm doing that. The only place I can find is lectures. And with that, I think we can get on with this episode. Okay, we can.

From the unexplained to the mundane, come join us on a journey to the fringe. Hello, and welcome to Journey to the Fringe. You're welcome. I assume at some point one of you at least has said thank you for making this. Not necessarily to us, but somebody probably has. So it just needs to be said at some point. We are your humble and clearly thanked hosts, Taylor and Chelsea. And today we are going to actually answer a viewer email.

Now we received an email from a viewer by the name of Nikola who had questions about, I wouldn't say questions. She was talking about an article that she has seen recently about the cloning of a woolly mammoth and that we are very close to actually having woolly mammoths back in the wild. She thought we should cover this. And I said, well, this is not back to her, but in my mind, I said this and it led me to making an entire episode about. So technically you are saying it back to her.

So I am kind of saying it back to her. You're welcome. You can listen. Yes. What I am saying is that although that part of the story might in fact be too mainstream to be considered a fringe topic. The overarching theme of what you're talking about, the idea of de-extincting an animal may in fact be fringe enough for us to do a topic on. So today I bring you the episode of de-extincting.

I'm going to talk about what it is, specifically what it's not, and then pros and cons and theorized animals that we would bring back from extinction. I'll love them, right? All of them, yes. Every single one. Specifically the dinosaurs. First, we're going to put them on an island. Oh shit, I forgot about those guys. Boy was I wrong. And surprisingly that is going to come up because de-extincting is actually a lot like what actually happens in Jurassic Park.

I think people have a wrong idea of what happens in Jurassic Park. But we're going to start with de-extincting. What is it not? Well, there's something that actually happens quite a lot out in the world and it's called rewilding. Chelsea, have you ever heard of rewilding? No, I could guess about it, but let's not do that. What do you think rewilding is? I would think that it would be like rescuing a herd animal and then putting it back into the environment. Okay, well you're not that far off.

Rewilding is reintroducing a species to an environment where it no longer exists, but did at some point and still exists somewhere else in the world. Is that not dangerous to do though? Because you see all this stuff about like Japanese beetle, specifically in this area. Yes, in those specific scenarios, Chelsea, those species never existed in that area, nor did we think, oh, we just need to put this here and we're going to be okay. So it's like back into an area that it used to be.

That it used to exist. That it has been. Okay. It's not an invasive species. No, it's not an invasive species at all. The two most common and historical examples of this that you can see out in the world, we'll talk about this one a ton, the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park in California, which reestablished the ecosystem and it did a huge amount to make it a more healthy ecosystem.

And then closer to home for us, the reintroduction of bison to North America through Elk Island National Park. Oh, I had no idea. So bison completely extinct in North America. They reintroduced Siberian or Russian bisons to North America through Elk Island National Park in the early 1900s with Elk Island National Park actually being also the first national parking. I had no idea about any of this and I grew up in my backyard.

So when we're talking about de-extincting, that would not be considered de-extincting because that is taking an animal that does exist and putting it back in somewhere where it did exist, but we're not bringing something back from extinction. We're just reintroducing what is not either.

Well surprisingly enough, when I'm talking about bringing a species back from extinction, it's not cloning either because when we're talking about cloning, there are actually a lot of negatives about it, specifically that DNA only has a half life of about 500 years and it breaks down incredibly fast and it's actually really hard to get in whole DNA.

Generally, when we're looking at a genome of a species, you're taking many different chunks of DNA that you found and trying to put a puzzle together like finding bones to a dinosaur, trying to build a structure to it. That sounds hard. Yeah, it's even harder than building a dinosaur from bones. And this is actually a lot like Jurassic Park because in Jurassic Park, they weren't cloning fucking dinosaurs either. Go rewatch the movie.

The reason they brought paleontologists in is because they were genetically re-engineering dinosaurs from existing animals and they wanted to be able to say paleontologists agreed these were dinosaurs. So they brought paleontologists in to trick them into thinking they were dinosaurs. They just wanted that agreement. But they were mixing it with something else. They are saying that they get the DNA from mosquitoes for millions of years ago, but that DNA would be too decayed to actually use.

But I'm sure they were mixing it with something or maybe I would just be. No, they were using the embryos of frogs. But what they actually did was genetically back engineer animals that already existed to look like dinosaurs. And he brought in paleontologists because he wanted somebody to sound off on it and say, yes, these are tried and true dinosaurs without telling them that they were back engineered. Oh, I missed that part. Yeah, it's a behind the scenes kind of story to it all. Rewatch it.

It makes sense when you know that DNA cannot survive millions of years. But much like those fake dinosaurs, these also would not be clones or any actual relation to the species that they would be coming from. If we're trying to de-extinct an animal, what we would actually be using is CRISPR or gene editing technology from the closest genetic relation surviving to an extinct animal and then implanting an embryo with these genetically altered DNA to be born as that species.

And as I found from somebody who actually explained this, there are four steps to de-extinct. First in silico, you need to sequence the full genome of extinct animal into digital data. Then you need to go to in vitro editing the important genes of extinct animals into a living reproductive cell of its nearest living relative.

And then three, you need to edit reproductive cells to create living proxies of the extinct animal and four, put it into the wild, grow the proxy animal population with captive breeding and eventually release them to take up their old ecological role in the wild. So that's at the end of the day, what the extinction is, literally bring a species back from extinction by creating a freak baby that you can throw back into its spot. Okay. That makes sense, Chelsea.

I mean, not naturally, but I can grasp what you're saying. Freak babies always make sense. About the freak babies. I'm sure you have questions about this, specifically when you're talking about the beetle, like why the hell would we want to introduce species back into an environment that they don't exist in, right? Yes and no. I'm sure you're asking that question. I mean, when we're extincting something, I mean, things do come and go naturally.

When you're looking at what humans have done to speed up that part, a big part of a natural process is missing and it kind of has a domino effect on other species. So yes, I would say I could see why you would want to reintroduce it to introduce that balance back in, but why must we do it with the giant man eating spiders? There's plenty of smaller spiders that we could reintroduce. And also we shouldn't talk too much about spiders because I know there's an arachnophobe that listens to us a lot.

We should at least allow them to listen to most of our episodes. So that's the last time I will mention spiders in this episode. I can't guarantee Chelsea won't, but they don't come up on my end and I'm the one reading this script. I'll try my best, okay? One of the big pros to de-extincting species is the fact that a lot of the species that we kill, whether accidental or intentionally or have gone extinct in the last 500 years, are what we call keystone species. What's a keystone species?

Well, I found a kind of an explanation to that from a website, rewildingeurope.com. I'm just going to go through this description. Every species plays a role in nature and all species are part of the web of life. But just as in the theater or in film, some species play more important roles punching above their weight when it comes to natural functions, structures and processes. Keystone species have low functional redundancies, explains Raquel Figuera, rewilding Europe's head of rewilding.

Quote, this means that when populations of these species decline or disappear, there are very few or no other species that can fulfill their role. Ecosystems then degrade and sometimes completely collapse. End quote. Animals like the sea otter along the Pacific coast of North America and the wolf in Yellowstone National Park are classic examples of keystone species.

By restoring a trophic cascade, the reintroduction of the wolf in Yellowstone in 1995 resulted in the return of certain animals and plant species, the restraint of others and stimulated the recovery of a richer, more balanced ecosystem. Keystone species not only exert their benefit and affects downward from the top of the food chain, such as with wolves and lynx, but upwards or in the bottom, such as with beavers and rabbits.

A wide range of organisms, including plants and fungi, can actually be considered keystone species as well, although the majority are animals. Raquel Figuera is keen to stress that restoring or encouraging the comeback of keystone species isn't just about boosting the natural diversity.

Quote, fully intact, complex ecosystems perform many essential functions, purifying air and water, turning decaying matter into nutrients, preventing erosion and flooding, mitigating climate change and enhancing people's well-being. She explains, quote, humans need keystone species to maintain the health and resilience of the ecosystem that support us.

And that's why a lot of the species that we're going to look at are keystone species, or at least have some sort of function that cannot be met by other animals in the environment. And that's why we're looking at actually just bringing straight back this animal and not looking to say another animal that fills that role in another ecosystem, which as we talked about, might end up being an invasive species and completely fucking everything over. Makes sense.

And an example of this that will come up eventually, well, you know what? I'll bring it up when it comes up, but it is an example of the keystone doing its work. Part of the work is, like they said, filtering water, making sure decaying masses are decomposing, and also making sure that species that they would hunt or be their prey stay healthy or can maintain their health. Other thing that this will do, it would be really fucking cool.

Like I don't know about you, but I want to see a fucking movie now. I don't know about you, but personally, they're like one of the coolest animal that has existed since dinosaurs. Yeah, that'd be cool. But I feel like wouldn't that have implications for this day and age? Well, don't worry, we're going to talk more. It will also help with biodiversity.

Seeing as how we are currently going through a mass extinction event, we are going through the six mass extinction event, at least according to most biologists, where we are losing at least like 60% of species over 100 years or so. It's just happening as shitty as hell. And hey, maybe we can fix that a little bit by bringing some stuff back. It's true. I mean, that's not a wrong point to me. We also have a lot of human guilt. Like talk about the dodo. The dodo didn't do shit.

It was happy to see this new friend. It wanted to give hugs and we shot them all. They don't even taste good, at least according to the historical records of the time. We literally just shot them all. It's not like the turtles from the Galapagos. They're not fucking turtles. No, we're near turtles. We're near turtles, yes, where you couldn't even get a sample back because they were too damn delicious. Yeah, that's part of it. It's just the guilt.

People feel bad and it's weird that we can attach this whole thing to the last of a species being in existence or the fact that we had a hand solely in something no longer existing on Earth. It does happen. You see these go extinct all the time, but the fact that we played a role in some of these really makes us want to bring them back. Well, I have guilt as well. I have guilt. I feel bad for the world, yeah. We did it. I don't feel particularly responsible for it.

I do have some guilt about it, yes. But there are also cons about this. It might fix ecosystems. It might increase biodiversity. But again, like I said, these are freak babies. We're not actually bringing species back. We're giving an iteration of something that we think is close to it. We would never actually be able to bring these non-freak babies back. I have a feeling about it. I can't prove it or anything. But I just feel like it would go wrong because it's not nature.

It's because you watch Jurassic Park. Don't lie to yourself. It very well could be because I watched Jurassic Park. Those electric fences won't last. Newman is going to be put in charge and Newman can't be trusted. We know that. It's one thing I know about Newman. It might be from Jurassic Park. I can't pinpoint the exact reason. But yeah. Who knows for sure what Jurassic Park says. It's true.

Yeah. It seems like, especially like to fix ecosystems, having a keystone species back in there would fix them or at least slowly go in the right direction. However, there are much better ways to spend money to fix the environment because you got to remember this would be putting into a lab and guessing and checking, doing experiments with things like say a woolly mammoth that has a two year minimum gestational period is going to be a long ass time before you see anything come out of this.

I mean the logic is there. I can't argue with that. I would prefer it. Yeah. So if you're really doing this for an environmental standpoint, there might be a better place to spend your hundreds of millions of dollars. Next up there may actually be a negative impact on the ecosystem. Yes. These would be keystone species that we're trying to reintroduce. But you got to remember they went extinct and these ecosystems continued on without them. Sometimes for hundreds, maybe even a thousand years.

And probably made up for them at that point and made new keystone creatures. Exactly. Either new keystones came up or the prey that they fed on have new predators against them or just the environment has grown since then. So how are we supposed to know that this would actually fix it or just cause problems in the long term by adding a species back? Also these freak babies, I don't exactly know how they plan on just reintroducing them into the environment.

You can't just put a baby into the environment and say, look, you're top of the food chain. Go do shit. Isn't necessarily going to work. Yeah. Would they know? These things don't necessarily know how to do what they were doing or wouldn't have the parental training or the instincts to be able to necessarily take on that role again. That could be a comedy. Yeah. A fish out of water mammoth. Yeah. Like a human trying to teach like a alpha predator how to be an alpha predator.

These freak babies are likely destined for generations of cages while we try to make sure that they're ready to go back into the wild. Oh, that sounds awful. And then the last thing, this is more of like a philosophical thing, but like by being able to de-expink species or at least bring this up as a topic, it might actually dampen the perception of extinction.

Whereas if a species actually is gone forever, people might not see that necessarily as a negative thing with us being able to de-extinct it in the future at some time. Oh, that's true. So the actual cause of preservation might lose traction, especially if you have the option of de-extincting or preserving a species. Probably the best point of all yet. Especially with one sounding way fucking cooler than the other.

Yeah. And it's a dangerous thought having people be like, it's okay, we'll just bring it back. But those are the pros and cons that I've seen. There is a case to be made either way. I definitely see more pros on the con side. What? There's a better way to say that. I see more cons than pros to this. With that said, I do want to make a few points that we'll move forward with because I'm going to talk about the species now that we're at least looking at de-extincting.

And I want you to remember that when we're looking at this, you need a close relative that's still alive so that we can de-extinct through that. So not everything is actually a good candidate for de-extinction, particularly if it went extinct too long ago, either because we don't have any DNA around it or two, we don't have any close relatives that would be able to support the gestational period. I'm making sense.

Because gestation is a very weird thing that is super finicky between species, and that's why we can't mate with everything. Just kind of a simple. I wouldn't want to. That's... Yeah, fair enough. But we're all 34. What about the thylacine? Don't worry, we'll talk about the thylacine. So without further ado, we shall go through the proposed candidates for de-extinction. This is not an exhaustive list. There are definitely more out there.

These however are the most common or things that have at least had plans already put in action or at least have money being raised for their de-extinction. Keep in mind, we are now going to learn that there are different kinds of de-extinction as we go through these. So to start it off, we have the Pyrenean ibics. So the Pyrenean ibics is a goat in Spain. It was a subspecies of the Spanish ibics that lived in the Iberian Peninsula.

While it was abundant through medieval times, overhunting in the 19th and 20th century led to its demise. In 1999, only a single female named Celia was left alive in Ordessa National Park. Scientists capture her, took a tissue sample from her ear, collared her, and then released her back into the wild where she lived until she was found dead in 2000. Having been crushed by a fallen tree. No! Anyone can imagine being the last to see her. That was the sadest thing ever. And that's how it was.

I didn't even move out of the way of the tree. And that was the same ear they captured her. Okay, can't fuck this up. I'm the last of my species. Oh no. In 2003, scientists used the tissue sample to attempt to clone Celia and resurrect extinct subspecies. Despite having successfully transferred nuclei from her cells into domestic goat egg cells and impregnating 208 female goats, only one came to term. The ibex baby that was born had a lung defect and lived for only 7 minutes before suffocating.

I was glad you didn't say it was a bio tree though. It was also killed by a tree. It's genetic. Nevertheless, this is considered a triumph in de-extinction. It is considered the first in de-extinction attempt. A problem to be faced in addition to the main challenges of reproduction of a mammal by cloning is that only females now can be reproduced by cloning the female individual Celia and no males exist for those females to reproduce with.

This could potentially be addressed by breeding male female clones with the closely related southeastern Spanish ibex and gradually creating a hybrid animal that will eventually bear more resemblance to the Pyrenean ibex than the southeastern Spanish ibex. So that's kind of a bit of the problem that you run into when you only have certain genetics to work with. I think they'll want to reintroduce it in at least a more arid or desert area with less trees just for the safety of the species.

But I mean they do what they need to. It was just the bad luck of the one that was left not the entire species. I know but that's the only sample you have to work with so who's to say? Who's to say? We don't know that they weren't all waved out that way. Next up, Chelsea this is one of my favorite animals that went extinct, the oryx. The protocow.

It was widespread across Eurasia, North Africa and the Indian subcontinent during the Pleistocene but only the European oryx survived in historical times. The species is heavily featured in European cave paintings such as Lescou and Cheveux in France and was still widespread during the Roman era. Following the fall of the Roman Empire over hunting of the oryx by nobility causes population to dwindle to a single population in Jack-de-Roe forests in Poland where the last wild one died in 1627.

For this I actually blame on the Caesars. Julie Caesar's actually quoted as saying like only the strongest and worthiest warriors can take down an oryx. So like the nobility always want to prove themselves by taking one down. That just became common with the nobility in the later years and that's why they're all gone. Okay. However, because the oryx is ancestral to most modern cattle breeds like we bred animal husbandry down from the oryx. It's just a giant cow that is really hard to handle.

That's why we tried to like calm it down through cows. And also that's probably why the Romans chose to show that animal whose boss become noble. Yeah, but because it is ancestral to cattle breeds, it is possible for it to be brought back through selective back breeding to de-extinct. So instead of it being done through cloning, this would actually be because we have its children through a different species.

We can back breed trying to get the genetic traits to show an oryx and reintroduce it into the wild. I mean, isn't that good enough? And that at the end of the day is a much more natural way. And I think would actually show a more proper oryx being reintroduced to the wild. I don't know if you feel that way as well. Natural breeding seems like a more right way to do it. Now that it's come up, of course that seems more natural because then it's going to happen more gradually.

It's not reintroducing something. It's breeding something that's already here, so it's going to be more successful, I would say. That's what we do with Todd. Exactly. And this has been attempted. The first attempt at this was by Heinz and Lutz Heck using modern cattle breeds, which resulted in the creation of probably the P.G.ist of evil villain animalry, the Heck cattle. This breed has been introduced in nature for serfs across Europe.

However, it differs strongly from oryx and physical characteristics. And some modern attempts claim to try to create an animal that is nearly identical to the oryx and morphology behavior and even genetics. There are several projects that aim to create a cattle breed similar to the oryx through selectively breeding primitive cattle breeds over a course of 20 years create a self-sufficient bovine grazer in herds of at least 150 animals in rewilded nature areas across Europe.

For example, the Taurus program and the Taurus project. And Taurus in the sky is based on the oryx. So there are actually several different projects to bring them back. This organization is partnered with the organization of rewilding Europe to help restore balance to European nature. A competing project to recreate the oryx is the Oryx project by the True Nature Foundation, which aims to recreate the oryx through a more efficient breeding strategy and through genome editing.

So there is another one that's saying like we can do this faster by editing back to what the oryx will be in order to decrease the number of generations of breeding needed and the ability to quickly eliminate undesired traits from the oryx like cattle population.

It is hoped that oryx like cattle will re-invigorate European nature by restoring its ecological role as a keystone species and bring back biodiversity that disappeared following the decline of European megafauna as well as helping to bring new economic opportunities related to European wildlife viewing. See that whole statement kind of worries me. I liked how it started out with the head cattle. Although that one might turn into an evil villain plot.

The genetic engineering and the second half of that don't work. Yeah and it just seems like someone not having patience to not see it in their lifetime potentially. See like reap the what they're. Or you know investors want to see bang for their life. Yeah they want to see progress happening. Yeah so there's no way to know that that's what's gonna happen if you bring the oryx back anyway. Yeah at the end of the day because they've been gone for 400 years.

They could wreak havoc on the ecosystem because it's not been there and it might wipe everything else out. That's the state with everything else that we're talking about the extinct in general. The other thing that we didn't even talk about beforehand but we probably should at this point it will have to actually deal with modern day humans. Like we don't like things being on our property when they're small. Yeah and maybe it comes back and wipes us out. We don't know. We don't know for sure.

That's true. Why did we give it laser eyes? The genes were just there. It seemed convenient. The new ones come with laser eyes specifically to kill humans. Modern day humans. They don't want to go extinct again. Okay next up the quagga. It's a subspecies of the plain zebra. This one is a actually quite literally much more of a plain zebra because only half of it actually has stripes on it. The other half is like donkey-ish. Like no stripes. What the fuck is wrong with this animal?

The printer ran out of toner, they just went all black down the back. Why do we want to bring this one back? We'll get to that. That's weird. I don't like this. The quagga is distinct from the plain zebra in that it was striped on its face and up to torso but its rear abdomen was solid brown and its legs were white. It was native to South Africa but was wiped out in the wild due to over hunting for sport and the last individual died in 1883 in the Amsterdam Zoo.

However, since it's technically the same species as the surviving plain zebra, it has been argued that the quagga could be revived through artificial selection. Yeah. Again, this is one where we could take the exact same plan as the oryx. I was just gonna say, just like we were just talking about, quite easy. But this one's a little harder though because we don't farm zebras. Zebras are actually very shitty animal husbandry. Right, yes. I did know that. So the breeding would be a little harder.

No one can control the zebra. Yeah, exactly. We can control horses, we can't control zebras. I just find this animal fucking weird because it's a zebra but not quite. I know. I also am confused why it's not like a zebra or a zibron or something like that. Like why a quagga? Like you just off. Just off. Just off. The zebra. This is a zebra. Just like it came out wrong. Didn't have the right print. It's clearly a zebra. Yeah, a zebra or something. It has to be. A zebra.

A quagga project aims to breed a similar form of zebra through selective breeding with plain zebras. It also aims to release these animals onto the western cape once an animal that fully resembles the quagga is achieved, which could have beneficial impact on the ecosystem by eradicating introduced species of trees such as the Brazilian pepper tree, the Tupuana Tipu, the Acacia saligna, bugweed, camphor tree, stone pine, cluster pine, weeping willow and the Acacia Myronse.

Why we introduce so many of these fucking things that are terrible. I don't know. But apparently we did and only the quagga can save us. I was just going to say, like, what's why these guys like what have they done that the zebras can't? I don't know. But the zebras ain't doing it. Apparently. Yeah, they're just not. I didn't actually look into the why. I just saw that and I was like, huh, okay, sure. This guy needs some sort of superpower because he's the lame cousin of the zebra.

Maybe they just felt bad for him. They're like, poor guy. Next up is the thylacine, which we have talked about before he was coming. He went commonly called the Tasmanian Tiger. It was native to Australia's mainland Tasmania and the New Guinea area. We have done further explanations on the thylacine or the Tasmanian Tiger way back in the day. Is that Cryptid 101? It's somewhere way back. It's way back. Yeah. I can't remember where that would have been. I'll find it. Well, we don't.

But yeah, just school listen to the backlogs. We'll take our first three episodes and go from there because yeah, we don't like those. And don't listen to them because we said don't listen to them. Like actually don't listen to them. We've got much better content now. Remember, we usually say that was a good episode. No, don't listen to the first three episodes. They're not good episodes. Yeah, we still have them up. Yeah. It is believed to have become extinct in the 20th century.

Some people heavily dispute this, but we're going to have to put those views on the back burner for now because we're talking about de-extinction. The thylacine had become extremely rare or extinct on the Australian mainland before British settlement of the continent. The last known thylacine named Benjamin, which is a very Australian name, died at the Hobart Zoo on September 7th, 1936. He's believed to have died as a result of neglect of all things, apparently. I didn't know this before.

He was locked out of his sheltered sleeping quarters and he was exposed to a rare occurrence of extreme Tasmanian weather, extreme heat, and then freezing temperatures at night. I just remember feeling so sorry for Benjamin and I'm sure it's because of mistreatment. That and being the only one of your species. That was also sad. Yeah, that was sad.

Yeah. Official protection of the species by the Tasmanian government was introduced on July 10th, 1936, 59 days before the last known specimen died in activity. So good on them. Go Australia. Over in December of 2017, it was announced in Nature Ecology and Evolution that the full nuclear genome of the thylacine had successfully been sequenced, marking the completion of the critical first step towards the extension that began in 2008.

With the extraction of the DNA samples from the preserved pouch specimen, the thylacine genome was reconstructed by using genome editing methods and the Tasmanian devil was used as a reference for the assembly of the full nuclear genome.

Andrew J. Paske from the University of Melbourne has stated that the next step towards the extension will be to create a functional genome which will require extensive research and development, estimating that a full attempt to resurrect the species may be possible as early as 2027. And in August of 2022, the University of Melbourne and Colossal Biosciences, which will come up again, announced a partnership to accelerate the extinction of the biosec.

So there's been millions of dollars pumped into this. We'll see if they can jump that date ahead from 2027. One of the biggest problems they're going to run into. Chelsea, I want you to type into Google, closest living relative thylacine. It's not going to be like a shurikus. No. And the episode is the less charismatic cryptids. Fucking squirrel. Basically. A marsupial squirrel. Okay, this guy has the stripes from the fucking... Yeah, he stole the quaggast. The Zofra.

You can tell he knows it too. You're calling him out and he says, okay. This is why the Zofra went extinct. This guy, this cannot be his closest living relative. And the big problem here is their squirrel sized. I don't know what you know about the thylacine, but it's called the Tasmanian tiger. Not because it is squirrel size. So you know, the gestational problem is going to be the big one with this one.

You're going to have to take many generations to get slightly bigger to get to the actual size of the thylacine. Yeah, yeah, which seems to be a problem. People are impatient. No, they're not even going to like genetically breed it. They're going to genetically engineer it slowly one generation at a time. They do have shorter gestational times and lifespans that are much shorter. Yeah. So it would be easier, but still you are going to run into that problem.

You need multiple generations to get to the point where you want it. Yeah, that's weird. Okay. And one of the added benefits that I actually heard for specifically the thylacine, Chelsea, you know all the problems with the Tasmanian devil, right? They're basically going extinct because of face tumors. No. Oh yeah. The Tasmanian devil is basically going extinct because they have face tumors in like all of them. What's wrong with that?

Is it because they're in Australia and there's the whole in the Ozone? I don't think so. Basically all Tasmanian devils have this. Oh no, don't Google it guys. Don't Google it. Some people have proposed that reintroducing its natural predator into the environment because thylacines live off Tasmanian devils might actually pick off the weaker ones who spread it to the others and actually make for a healthier Tasmanian devil ecosystem. That's not a bad theory, but that's I'm not saying.

But like, like we said, that's a keystone species feature is it can shape its ecosystem. I can't believe I Googled that. Not as exciting, but a kind of big one is the passenger pigeon, which used to absolutely engulf North America. Like they had flying packs of millions. We have the first travelers of North America that wrote in English that we know about. They would talk about passenger pigeon packs. Flock is probably a better word. Pack sounds wrong. So many of them fly.

It seems like night when they fly through the sky because they block out the sun. Oh my God. I didn't want to look at that either. They're disgusting. I mean, they're just pigeons. Yeah, they're gross. Oh, Google it. Okay. So they used to number in the billions before being wiped out due to commercial hunting and habitat loss during the 20th century. The nonprofit revive and restore obtained DNA to the passenger pigeon from museum specimens and skins.

However, this DNA is degraded because it's so old. For this reason, simple cloning would not be an effective way to perform de extinction for the species because part of the genome would be missing. Instead, revive and restore focuses on identifying mutations in the DNA that would cause a phenotypic difference between the extinct passenger pigeon and its closest living relative, the band tailed pigeon.

In doing this, they can determine how to modify the DNA of the band tailed pigeon to change the traits to mimic the traits of the passenger pigeon. In this sense, the de extinct passenger pigeon would not be genetically identical to the extinct passenger pigeon, but it would have the same traits. The de extinct passenger pigeon hybrid is expected to be ready for captive breeding by 2024 and release into the wild by 2030.

That's actually probably the first one of anything I've talked about that will be out in the wild as a de extinction proposal. And we'll just see how it goes because they kind of seem like they might have been an almost invasive species when the Europeans weren't in North America. Yeah, well with numbers like that and pigeons are pigeons, I mean, these ones are a little different and actually pigeons, I believe they're considered the first farmed animals by humans. We used to eat them a lot.

And in parts of the world, we still eat them a lot. Yeah. And in the long call where you can get it is like a very delicious meal. Next up, something along, you know, the winged rat idea. Let's talk about actual rats, the Claire's rat. It is a large rat endemic to Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean. And it is believed that Mclare's rat might have been responsible for keeping the population of Christmas Island red crab in check.

If you want to see something disgusting, Chelsea, look up Christmas Island crap. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I've seen this. Okay, you know what? Nevermind. I've seen a different crap. But yeah, these crabs litter the islands. Yeah, there's like something I can't remember what it is, but they're abundant.

Yeah. So these are believed to have gone extinct accidentally through the introduction of black rats by the European expeditions that came to the lands and infected the Mclare's rats with diseases, possibly tryponosum, which resulted in the numbers of the species declining. The last recorded sighting of the Mclare's rat was in 1903.

And in March of 2022, researchers discovered that Mclare's rat shared about 95% of its genes with the living Norway brown rat, thus sparking hopes and bringing species back to life. Although scientists were mostly successful in using CRISPR technology to edit the DNA of the living species to match that to the extinct one, a few genes were missing, which would mean resurrected rats would not be genetic pure replicas and again would be freaked babies. I mean, they all are.

Not the scientific word, but our words. Yeah, they all would be freaked. None of these have actually always. I mean, maybe the oryx would be considered close to because it's like naturally bred back ways, but again, still a freak baby. It seems like they weren't a fan of that though. Next up, I'm just going to rattle off the birds. Everybody considers the birds differently just because they don't have the same gestational problem necessarily that mammals do.

So egg gestation has always been considered kind of something slightly different from inside gestation and that we don't have to worry as much about it. So when you're looking at these, these close relatives, you don't have to worry as much about the differences between species. Nonetheless, we still haven't really reintroduced anything. So I guess we'll get there when we get there.

Just a few that they're talking about the Heath hen, which is a subspecies of the prairie chicken, which became extinct on Martha's vineyard in 1932. Despite conservation efforts, we got a ton of DNA from it in museum specimens and protected areas. So people have proposed reintroducing it to its former habitat. Next up, the dodo, which I think is the example of human guilt for extincting a species.

They just wanted to love and we just wanted to eat and they weren't even that delicious and we kept in YouTube it. Again, from historical records, they're not delicious. This large, flightless, ground bird endemic to Mauritius. I actually had no idea how to say that. Because last sighted, Marutius, Marutius, Marutius, Marutius, I think. Okay, Marutius. It was last sighted in the 1640s and most likely when extinct by 1700.

Due to the exploitation by humans and due to introduced species such as rats and pigs, which ate their eggs, they only lay one egg per year. So getting your egg eaten is a big fucking deal for your species. It has since become a single of extinction in popular culture and due to the wealth of bones and some tissues, it is possible that this species may live again as a close relative surviving. Chelsea, I want you to look up closest surviving relative, dodo. It will surprise you. Like a toucan?

Isn't the dodo an idiot though? It just had no reason to fear us. People say it's an idiot. It had no reason to fear us. What is that? It's a pigeon. I don't like it. It's a colorful pigeon. Yeah. Don't like it. Next up, the elephant bird. Probably the largest bird to have ever existed, the elephant bird was driven to extinction by the early colonization of Madagascar. Ancient DNA has been obtained from egg shells, but may be too degraded to use for the extinction. We'll see how that one goes.

And specifically like these things are over eight feet tall and oh lord, it has thighs. I think it was called elephant bird just from its thighs. I don't want to look at this. Well, it looks like an emu, but it has like it is thick. Yeah, I don't want to look at it. From the thighs down. But I do want you to look up closest living relative to the elephant bird, Chelsea. I don't feel like I want to look at that either. This one actually is not bad. Kiwi. Yeah. What? Where do they get this thing?

They might run into trouble with the closest genetic relative because the closest genetic relative is the kiwi bird, which is absolutely minuscule compared to 80. It's probably closer to an elephant than it is to the kiwi bird. You would think. Okay. And then last up for the birds that we're going to talk about is the great awk, which is of course the giant ass puffin, a flightless bird similar to the penguin. The great awk went extinct in the 1800s due to humans hunting them for food.

The last two known great awks lived on an island near Iceland and were clubbed to death by sailors. I mean, slightly better than being hit by a tree, but not by much. There have been no known sightings since from the great awk has been identified as a good candidate for de-extinction by reviving or store a nonprofit organization. Its DNA can be used by altering a razor bills genome and breed the hybrids to create a species that will be very similar to the original great awks.

The plan is to reintroduce them back into their original habitat, which they would then share with razor bills and puffins were also at risk of extinction, which actually kind of worries me a little. If you're reintroducing a species to an area has two already almost extinct birds, aren't they all going after the same food? That's fighting fire with fire or something similar to a- They are saying that this would restore biodiversity and restore the part of the ecosystem, but who knows for sure.

But the great awk is really fricking cool looking. He is. He looks like a penguin. And he probably was delicious. Like this. Like just throwing that. He does look a little delicious. I'm going to admit it. And then after this, I found a few articles for species that I found really fucking cool that I was curious if people had ever proposed bringing them back to life. And apparently South Korea is like the leading edge of de-extincting animals. What?

Because they're the ones who came up for these. So South Korean scientists wanted to genetically resurrect an extinct cave life. Yeah, okay. This is an article from 2016. Someone's bold. Korea's bold. Yeah, exactly. The last panthera, Leospalia, known more commonly as the cave line, walked the earth about 10,000 years ago. And now a team of researchers in South Korea want to bring it back. This is in California. Just to let you know that the cave line existed.

A pair of frozen, well-preserved cubs, estimated to be weeks old and the size of Chihuahua was when they died, triggered a flurry of interest when they uncovered in permafrost in a remote region of Russia called Yakutia. Preservation meant learning about tissues and muscles. Stuff the fossil record isn't so great about keeping on hand. Wow, sorry. Whoever wrote this article didn't have English as good. Yeah. Blame it on them. But there were other possibilities and more out there ideas.

South Korean genesis, Hwang Woosuk, plans to de-extinct the lines using tissues from the cubs, basically mimicking his proposal to bring back the mammoth. This guy also wanted to bring back the mammoth. And also, Russian and South Korean scientists are planning the world's first cloning of a Canadian wood bison before attempting to recreate the extinct steppe bison.

Remains of a tale of an ancient steppe bison was recovered from Siberian permafrost in the Saka region, and the basin of a river known as Indurgikara, Indurgikai in August 2016. Thank you for affirming that. Yeah, it sounded great. Scientists are now planning to use the tale in order to obtain DNA for use in the cloning world.

Dr. Semyon Grigoryev, the director of the mammoth museum at the Northeastern Federal University, who leads the project, told the Siberian Times that the tale was probably over 8,000 years old, but that more tests are needed to date the discovery. Scientists are currently working on cloning a Canadian wood bison for the first time using a cow as a surrogate mother, and if they succeed, they will show that interspecies cloning is possible.

This is crucial to bringing ancient species back to life as scientists would have to use surrogate mothers from modern-day species, as we talked about. And interestingly enough, oryx and bisons have the exact same genetic closest relative in cows, because they both actually evolved from the oryx. So, my question here on this one is why aren't they just using a bison? Because they're genetically different, apparently. Really?

And my second question is, I mean, it seems like we already solved the problem. We just have different bison, and we seem to be doing okay. Yeah, but it's not as cool, because we didn't genetically engineer it. We just reintroduced from a different species, Chelsea. And we decided to use a cow as a surrogate mother. Our Korean colleagues already have an experience of cloning cows, and it will not affect the results much.

If the experiment will be successful, we will get 99.8% newborn bison, Dr. Gregorian, was quoted as saying. That's a weird way of saying this, that he said it. Yeah. Quote, it is very important for our project on cloning ancient animals who overcome the species barrier. Our Korean peers have already done crossbreed cloning, but no one yet did cross species cloning.

The success of interspecies cloning can give us hope for the survival of extinct animals and preservation of endangered species, according to Dr. Gregorian. So yeah, I think that is a super interesting point, and I don't really know what the difference would be genetically engineering a species to bring it back from extinction, to reintroduce into an ecosystem, versus just taking something that is genetically more or less the same thing and planting it into that same ecosystem.

Yeah. And especially at this point, it doesn't have a space in that ecosystem, because we have filled it with something else. Yeah, exactly. This is a weird one. I don't even know what they're doing. Yeah, the Koreans, they don't read the English stuff. That's true. That could be why. They're just trying to help. And of course, the boy I say for last, the woolly mammoth himself, woolly teens. Oh, I forgot about him.

The existence of preserved soft tissue remains and DNA from woolly mammoths has led to the idea that the species could be recreated by scientific means. Two methods have been proposed to achieve this. The first would be to use the cloning process. However, even the most intact mammoth samples have had little usable DNA because of their condition of preservation. There's not enough DNA intact to guide the production of an embryo.

The second method would involve artificially inseminating an elephant egg cell with preserved sperm from the mammoth, from the mammoth, not the salmon. That's a different thing. The resulting offspring would be a hybrid of a mammoth and its closest living relative. Do you know what that is, Chelsea? That's right. The elephant bird. No, the Asian elephant. Okay, I just had to process that for a minute. Kiwis, that's right. Kiwis. I'll accept that one.

Okay. After several generations of crossbreeding these hybrids and almost pure woolly mammoth could be produced, however, sperm cells of modern mammals are typically potent for up to 15 years after deep freezing, which could hinder this method. And in 2008, the Japanese team found usable DNA in the brains of mice that had been frozen for 16 years. They hope to use similar methods to find usable mammoth DNA. In 2011, Japanese scientists announced plans to clone mammoths within six years.

I don't think that happened. That would be 2017. As far as I know, they didn't create mammoths and then tell the old people in Japan to kill them. That just doesn't seem like a timeline in my mind. No, it doesn't even make sense. In my mind, they weren't able to clone mammoths. And then because of that, they said, old people, you should kill yourself.

In March of 2014, the Russian Association of Medical Anthropologists reported that blood recovered from a frozen mammoth carcass in 2013 would now provide a good opportunity for cloning the woolly mammoth.

Another way to create a living woolly mouth would be to migrate genes from the mammoth genome into the genes of the sluice living relative, the Asian elephant, to create hybridized animals with the notable adaptations that it had for living in such a cold environment that modern elephants could not. This is currently being done by a team led by Harvard Genes as George Church. She is also the most likely one to come out in the next couple of years.

The team has made changes in the elephant's genome with the genes that gave the woolly mammoth its cold resistant blood, longer hair and an extra layer of fat, according to geneticist Henrik Poiner. A revived woolly mammoth or mammoth elephant hybrid may find suitable habitat in the tendra and the taiga forest ecosystems.

George Church has hypothesized the positive effects of bringing back the extinct woolly mammoth would have on the environment, such as the potential for reversing some of the damage caused by global warming. He and his fellow researchers predict that mammoths would eat the dead grass allowing the sun to reach the spring grass.

Their weight would allow them to break down dense, insulating snow in order to let cold air reach the soil, and their characteristics of felling trees would increase the absorption of sunlight. In an editorial condemning the extinction, Scientific America pointed out that the technologies involved could have secondary applications specifically to help species on the verge of extinction to regain their genetic diversity.

So this is probably the one that has the most money thrown behind it right now is the woolly mammoth. I don't buy necessarily that it would be great for global warming. I feel like that's just they wanted those words thrown in there. I was just gonna say that's totally a lot of buzzwords. Elling trees to let more sun through would cool the planets. That doesn't make any fucking sense.

Yeah, no, a lot of that didn't make sense and it didn't seem like an argument that like it was just buzzwords that was. I need to bring this up. This is the end of my episode. The real reason he's lying to us. He just wants to know like the rest of us what mammoth tastes like. And this has been something man has been plagued with the question of for eons. And this comes from a article from where is it? I think it's the Atlantic.

I forgot to put that, but this is an article from the Atlantic all about what woolly mammoths would taste like. And my God, it was a wild ride. And this is how I wanted to finish this episode on. In 1901, an expedition to the Ipresovka River in Siberia found a male mammoth so exquisitely preserved that it still had grass in its mouth. The mammoth's bones and skin were put on display in St. Petersburg and its flesh was supposedly served at a mammoth banquet. The meal was a hit.

According to one glowing account, particularly the course of mammoth steak, which all the learned guests declared was agreeable to the taste and not much tougher than some of the sirloin furnished by the butchers of today. Half a century later, the explorers club put on its own exotic feast in New York. This time, the prehistoric flesh reportedly came from a carcass found in the Aleutian Islands by a Jesuit turned geologist known as the Glacier Priest.

Each diner got mere slivers of meat, but those slivers made quite the impression. That's what home bragging of their Ice Age dinner, but they later disagreed over whether the meat was really supposed to be mammoth or mastodon or an extinct giant sloth called Megatherium. And in any case, the DNA analysis of the meat from 1951 eventually proved it was none of the above. It wasn't even prehistoric. It's likely DNA came from a green sea turtle, which still lives today.

As for the 1901 banquet, it couldn't have been mammoth either. Quote, all stories published in newspapers of this country, of a dinner in St. Petersburg where the meat of the Berserkov mammoth was served are 100% invention. The paleontologist IP Tomachev wrote in the transaction of the American Philosophical Society back in 1929.

As Tomachev also wrote, while a mammoth meat frozen for tens of thousands of years is absolutely unpaneled with an intolerable putrid smell, it is not something that belongs on a dinner table. It's certainly not something that belongs in a human mouth. In the 18th and 19th century, explorers of Siberia wrote that the region's indigenous people, the Evenki, occasionally fed their dogs mammoth meat, but humans have generally been less enthusiastic about eating it.

Over tens of thousands of years, the things that make meat tasty turn quite foul. That is one problem it turns to soap, specifically a substance called adipocere, also known as corpse wax or grave wax when it's found in human bodies left in cool wet conditions. Paleontologists have noticed it in the vat of woolly mammoths too, even though extremely cold conditions are thought to inhibit microbes that turn that into adipocere.

The substance could have formed in Siberia, says Sherry Forbes, a forensic expert at the University of Quebec at Torreau-Rabère. If temperatures ever fluctuated over tens of thousands of years in adipocere, she adds can have the texture of cottage cheese and the smell is rancid. I know why people would not want to eat it, she wrote in an email. And the muscles of frozen mammoths change as well.

Like meat left in the freezer for too long, the formation of crystals would pierce the muscle fibers of the meat, says Matt Harding, a food chemist at American University. Frozen the meat might still be reasonably solid and well meat-like, but once defrosted he said it will be turned into goo.

In fact, Dmitry Arziotov, a historian of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, wrote earlier this year that Russian paleontologists he interviewed about woolly mammoths had tried to fry mammoth meat, but it turned to smelly liquid immediately. Not that this has stopped certain mammoth hunters in recent woolly mammoth documentaries, just as 2.0, one expeditioner even chose raw ice age meat on camera.

So people clearly want to eat woolly mammoth and I think it actually has driven some people to study them and even get close to them. And let's face it, I think that is the reason people want to bring that one back from extinction. It has to be. I mean, that was entirely too much. That article was way too long about eating things that have been dead for thousands of years. It's true. That was way more than ever needed to be written about it.

And yet here we are at the end of an episode, clearly taking a good chunk of it to talk about how people really want to eat woolly mammoth. So at the end of the day, shouldn't we all be able to eat extinct meats? That is your new topic of conversation for your fancy dinner guests. I have been Taylor here with Chelsea. We are Journey to the Fringe. Thank you all for listening and we will see you next week. Bye. Thank you for listening to Journey to the Fringe.

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