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Posted on 03/03/2022 9:59:51 AM PST by Red Badger
Ping!.....................
Want to see one? Look behind an Aussie conservative if you can find one.
The late Dr. Michael Crichton was a visionary genius.
Cool. Now do wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. The 21st century should finally start living up to the billing.
And giant wolves...................
I wonder if it would be easier to “resurrect” a marsupial than a mammal, since the “surrogate mother” won’t have to carry them fully to term?
Also, which species would they pick for a surrogate? With mammoths, elephants are the obvious choice. For a Tasmanian tiger, would they use a Tasmanian devil, or a wombat, or what?
“and saber-toothed tigers”
No thanks, Joe Exotic.
Roo...................
Always wanted to hunt a wooly mammoth. Not by myself...
Does it even have a near-species relative still around in Australia? From the standpoint of taxonomy what’s close? The Taz & Wombat looks-wise seem a stretch.
What could go wrong?
Yes. He was indeed. I found it fascinating to read about the movie “The Andromeda Strain” where he wanted the movie to be ultra-realistic, and actually purchased state of the art equipment for the time that would have been used to identify the pathogen.
In the movie, to determine the size of a filtering material they needed to be safe to breathe the air, they had a machine with set filter sizes, and would expose a susceptible creature like a guinea pig or rat to contaminated air making the filter successively finer until the animal was not infected, and they could determine the size of the pathogen to X nanometers depending on the filter that provided protection.
Yes. He was a talented and interesting guy. One of my absolute favorite books of his is “State of Fear”. He so accurately captured the essence of the environmental moonbats on the Left and thoroughly skewered them. One of my favorite scenes from the book is the good guys being tailed by the evil bad guys in a car as they drove around. If it were the Mafia, they would be driving Cadillacs. If it were the KGB they might be tailing you in a “Black Maria”.
In “State of Fear” the evil bad guys bent on murder drove...Toyota Prius’!!!
I’d love to live to see this. If the technology is ever developed to bring back extinct species zoos will become very interesting.
Tasmanian devil is pretty closely related despite the appearances.
Upon further research, this might be the best choice:
https://australian.museum/learn/animals/mammals/spotted-tailed-quoll/
“would expose a susceptible creature like a guinea pig or rat to contaminated air making the filter successively finer until the animal was not infected”
I would think the opposite approach, starting with a very fine filter then enlarging it until the subject WAS infected would save you a lot of money on animal subjects...
It'll be cool if they can accomplish resurrecting the species. To do it, I'd guess they'll try with the closest genetic match.
My guess is they would use the laws of halves.
Try one, if it is fatal, go to half size. Try again.
If still fatal, halve it again. Then when you get one where the subject doesn’t get infected, you go halfway up to where you were before that.
Full disclosure-I have no idea if that REALLY is the way they did it back then. But the thing I read about Crichton said he actually spent a HUGE sum of money on equipment to have in the scenes, and consulted with the best people in the world on how it was done at that time.
“Marsupials are mammals. They’re just non-placental ones.”
Yes, but in common vernacular, when people say “mammal” they mean “placental mammals”.
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