13th
Extinct Lifeforms Worth Resurrecting
Great herds of Woolly Mammoths roamed over huge swathes of the northern hemisphere for tens of thousands of years, and you’d better believe they left their mark – among other things – on the frozen tundra. It’s impossible to calculate the beneficial effect of dropped dung by the megaton year after year, millennium after millennium, on the arctic environment but we can assume those vast, empty plains would be much more fertile after our shaggy pals resume dumping much more fertilizer.
Mammoths haven’t been extinct for too long, geologically speaking, with the last dwarf population on Siberia’s isolated Wrangel Island finally biting the permafrost around 1650 BC. Speaking of permafrost, hundreds of mammoths remain preserved to an astonishing, er, degree in what’s been called “nature’s freezer”, and their DNA is perhaps the least degraded of any ancient extinct creature.
