To create or not create. That is the question.

Columbian mammoth - courtesy of Wikimedia commons

In the 1993 film Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum's character Dr. Ian Malcolm says to John Hammond "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should"
This is the question now being raised, not in a fantasy film, but in a real life setting, and in a very serious and heated debate.

Japanese scientists hope to have woolly mammoths gracing parks across the globe by the year 2016. ( Please refer back to my March 18, 2011 blog post at Crypto Haven Research & Investigations titled " Lyuba, the little mammoth with a big story "

But Japan isn't the only country in the running.

 In March of this year, scientists with The Lazarus Project in Australia made the astonishing announcement that they had been able to clone embryos of an odd little amphibian known as the gastric brooding frog ( Look them up, you'll love what you learn about them ), which was declared extinct in 1979. A cousin to it, the northern gastric brooding frog was declared extinct in 1985. All succumbed to de-habitation and a nasty little destroyer of frogs known as the chytrid fungus.  

De-exctinction, as it is called, is part of a newly emerging field of science called "revival biology". But it is at the very least a controversial subject, and the lines in the sand aren't clear enough yet to know which way this is going to go in the next five to ten years, let alone the distant future of genetics and DNA modification.
But one thought this brings up for me as a cryptozoologist is the question of exactly how long this has been going on and what creatures they have experimented with and created that we do not know about..........yet.

Could we actually be witness to mammoths roaming our zoos along with elephants and chimpanzees in the next handful of years? The answer seems to be a resounding YES.

But..........................should we?

Did these animals have their time on earth and die out for a reason?

Could bringing them back upset the current balance of nature even more than it is now?

Admittedly, I would probably shove through the line and push children out of the way be the first pair of eyes to catch a glimpse of a newly born Columbian mammoth in the Detroit Zoo.

Wouldn't you?