Posted 11 July 2007 - 03:17 PM
Ahoy,
I have always had mixed feelings on this. I would love to see an extinct animal returned to life. The mammoth, dinosaurs, etc. As for habitat, the Earth has enough diversity of climate zones that we could very easily put the animal into a very close match to the original climate it came from. The problem is we really wouldn’t learn too much about the animals. They would be raised in a human induced and controlled environment and wouldn’t have the same interaction and development of the original animals. We would be able to learn what the animal looked, moved and sounded like, but very little about its natural behavior. True, some of the animal’s instinctual behavior would come through, but we would have no way of knowing what is “natural” for the animal and what is “adapted” due to the human interference. Think of the vast behavioral differences between any animal raised in the “wild” as opposed to a like animal raised in captivity. So, I guess from the point of curiosity, I think if we have the science to bring the mammoth back, why not? The mammoth wouldn’t know that this isn’t how it is supposed to live and it would be neat to see a living mammoth. But I wouldn’t expect to learn too much about the animals.