Should we bring extinct species back? | with Sadiah Qureshi

This piece traces how the modern idea of extinction was invented and then transformed, starting with Georges Cuvier's 18th-century anatomical proof that species like the mammoth could vanish forever, through 19th and 20th century collapses of the great auk, bison, and passenger pigeon that showed humans could drive living species to extinction in real time. It then follows the rise of cryopreservation and 'frozen ark' biobanking, from a 1949 freezing breakthrough to San Diego's Frozen Zoo and the short-lived 2003 clone of the extinct Pyrenean ibex, up through today's de-extinction ventures like Colossal Biosciences' engineered 'dire wolf.' It matters because these technologies are forcing a redefinition of what extinction actually means and raising ethical questions about whether frozen genetic material turns permanent loss into a reversible inconvenience, potentially diverting resources from species still alive.

• Georges Cuvier's comparative anatomy of mammoth and elephant teeth and jaws proved the mammoth was a separate, extinct species [02:38]
• In 1859, Charles Lyell's presidential address announced ancient humans and mammoths once roamed the earth together, the same year Darwin published Origin of Species [05:31]
• Ornithologist Alfred Newton concluded the widely distributed great auk was driven extinct by commercial exploitation, reframing extinction as an ongoing process rather than only a prehistoric one [10:28]
• North American bison plummeted from an estimated 60 to 30 million in the late 1700s to only 456 by the 1890s [12:46]