Mammoths, Dodos, and Dire Wolves roaming the earth again seems like a distant dream, right? Well, there’s growing excitement around the idea of bringing back extinct animals — mammoths, dire wolves, even dodos. It sounds like a breakthrough, a leap made in science.

De-extinction, as it’s being called, isn’t actually resurrection. It’s not about magically reviving an animal that vanished thousands of years ago.

‘Cool Achievement’

At first, this might seem fascinating. It sounds like a way to undo past mistakes, to right ecological wrongs. But meanwhile, ecosystems across the globe — including in India — are falling apart.
More than 37,000 species are currently threatened with extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Companies like Colossal Biosciences are editing the DNA of animals that still exist — like gray wolves — to make them resemble long-lost species. So, the “dire wolf” they’re working on? It’s not actually a dire wolf. It’s a modified modern wolf wearing a prehistoric label.

“It is not a dire wolf-it is a gray wolf modified to be more like a dire wolf. That is a cool achievement, but they have not brought the dire wolf back,” says Professor Alexander Sturdwick from the University of California (UCLA).

And this is where things begin to feel out of place. Millions of dollars are being poured into projects that aim to reconstruct species from the past, while many species that are still with us are going extinct — often unnoticed and underfunded.

Do we need ‘flashy’, or something that really works?

Conservation, the everyday work of protecting habitats, restoring ecosystems, and regulating harmful practices, isn’t nearly as flashy. But it’s what actually works.

Clemens Driessen, in his essay No Need for De-Extinction, suggests that these high-tech resurrection efforts could easily distract us from the urgent, ongoing collapse of biodiversity.

70 percent of our wildlife populations are gone

In India alone, over 1,300 species are endangered. Since the 1970s, we’ve lost nearly 70% of global wildlife populations. These aren’t numbers meant to scare — they reflect a reality we’re still not responding to fast enough.

If extinction starts to feel reversible, like something we can just “fix” later in a lab, it loses the weight it should carry. It becomes just another problem for science to sort out eventually — which is a dangerous mindset.

There are also real ethical concerns. These animals being “brought back” aren’t appearing effortlessly. They’re created through trial-and-error, involving surrogate animals, failed pregnancies, and a lot of suffering that doesn’t make the press release.

And even when one does survive, where does it go? What kind of life does it live? Is it part of an ecosystem, or a symbol for something we already broke?

Some scientists argue that the technology used for de-extinction could someday help boost genetic diversity in endangered species or make them more resilient to climate change. That might be possible in the future. But right now, most of these projects are more about spectacle than survival.

This raises a more uncomfortable question: what does it say about us if we’re investing in the past while the present quietly disappears?

It’s easier, in many ways, to romanticise the idea of a lost animal walking the earth again than it is to deal with the mess we’ve made.

The only real solution

Conservation asks us to care in ways that don’t always come with recognition or excitement. It’s slow, frustrating work — but it’s also the only real solution we have.

So when we celebrate lab-made wolves or talk about mammoths coming back, maybe we should also ask what we’re ignoring in the process. What bees, birds, frogs, or forests are we letting vanish while chasing the drama of something already gone?

Because bringing something back doesn’t mean we’ve fixed what caused the loss in the first place. And if we keep getting used to absence — if it stops bothering us that nature feels a little emptier — then we risk forgetting what a full, living world even feels like.

And no technology, no matter how advanced, can bring that back.

NEWSNET INTERN AMAN KUMAR JHA STUDIES JOURNALISM AND MASS COMMUNICATION AT ST. XAVIER’S COLLEGE OF MANAGEMENT AND TECHNOLOGY IN PATNA, BIHAR. THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THIS ARTICLE ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR AND NOT NECESSARILY THOSE OF THE NEWSNET EDITOR AND STAFF.

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