002A-00 woolly mammoth
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xtinction is a part of nature. Of the five billion species that have existed on Earth, 99.9 per cent have vanished. The Late Devonian extinction, nearly four hundred million years ago, annihilated the jawless fish. The Triassic-Jurassic extinction, two hundred million years ago, finished off the crocodile-like phytosaur. Sixty-six million years ago, the end-Cretaceous extinction eliminated the Tyrannosaurus rex and the velociraptor; rapid climate change from an asteroid impact was the likely cause. The Neanderthals disappeared some forty thousand years ago. One day—whether from climate change, another asteroid, nuclear war, or something we can’t yet imagine—humans will probably be wiped out, too.
The difference with humans is that we’ve been taking a huge number of species down with us. Starting about three hundred thousand years ago, we learned to hunt with spears and in groups. That gave us significant agency in deciding which animals would disappear first—we chose them either because they wanted to eat us or because we wanted to eat them. The animals’ demise, though, helped doom large predators that hunted our preferred prey. Among the casualties were sabre-toothed cats and dire wolves. Along the way, various other species also breathed their last: woolly mammoths, Irish elk, dodos, carrier pigeons, Steller’s sea cows, great auks, thylacines (Tasmanian tigers). The carnage continues. Last year, the slender-billed curlew, a bird that once ranged over much of Europe and Asia, was declared gone. And there are only two northern white rhinos left—both females.
People have been sad about driving animals into oblivion for nearly as long as we have been eradicating them. And in recent centuries humans have tried to address the problem. In 1886, British authorities in South Africa were shocked by the speed with which Boer farmers had decimated the quagga, a half-striped relative of the zebra, and tried to save the species from extinction with the Better Preservation of Game Act. (The measure came too late.) In 1973, the U.S. Congress passed the Endangered Species Act, in response to the decline of many iconic American animals, including the bald eagle and the grizzly bear. Despite such laws and other conservation efforts, the current rate of extinction is, by some measures, a thousand times what it would be without humans.
Since the nineteen-eighties, various attempts have been made to see if it might be possible, somehow, to reverse the process. In theory, at least, the technological know-how that helped us extirpate so much wildlife could be deployed to bring back a few of our victims. Humans who are pursuing this goal are essentially asking for something that nature has never provided: a do-over.
Most of these investigations have been made by academic scientists or environmentalists. But what if the person trying to reverse an extinction was a man with an enormous amount of money, a mistrust of institutions, and a love of pop culture? The kind of guy who wants to move fast and fix things—but also increase his net worth. What animal would such a person choose to revive first? I saw the answer in late February, when someone turned on his computer and showed me a photograph of two cute white dire-wolf pups sitting on an asymmetrical throne made of iron swords. At first glance, it looked like an A.I.-generated image, but I was told that these were actual living animals. They were growing up at an undisclosed location, but in a few weeks he would let me go visit them.
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