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Life

Extinction is a fact of life. Could we stop it – or even reverse it?

The fossil record tells us extinctions happen all the time. The question is what part we play – and whether we could ever bring back creatures like the dinosaurs

By Graham Lawton

11 December 2019

mammoth skeleton in museum

Joel Sartore/Getty Images

WHEN what is now the iconic emblem of extinction finally kicked the bucket, nobody noticed. At that time – around 1662, probably the year a dodo was last seen in the wild – the idea that entire species could be wiped out had never occurred to anyone. Pre-Darwinian biology was in thrall to the idea that animals and plants were perfect and eternal designs of the Creator.

Disbelief certainly greeted French naturalist Georges Cuvier in 1796 when he suggested that mammoth, mastodon and giant sloth bones were remains of animals that had died out. Nonsense, snorted the establishment: they were simply living…

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