If movies, teevee, and the kind of books people read on airplanes have a message for us, it's that cool super-science will eventually be the death of us all. And hey, it looks like they were right:

The idea of resurrecting extinct animals moved a step closer to reality last year when scientists announced that they had decoded almost all of the genome of the woolly mammoth, from 60,000-year-old remains found frozen in Siberia.

Now New Scientist magazine has named the 10 other beasts most likely to rise again, including the Irish elk deer whose antlers measured 12 feet across, the dodo and Neanderthal man.

Animals that died out thousands of years ago could be recreated using genetic information retrieved from well-preserved specimens recovered from permafrost, dark caves or dry desserts.

The article goes on to mention that scientists probably won't be able to bring back the dinosaurs because DNA degrades over millions of years, but we could possibly resurrect sabre-toothed tigers (what a great idea!) and creatures like...

The Volkswagen Beetle-sized "colossal" armadillo, with its spiky, club-like tail, once rumbled across the South American countryside, and some might fancy seeing it do so again.

Yeah, I'm not one of those people. In fact, I tend to fall squarely in the camp of people who don't "fancy" gigantic animals with spiky, club-like tails rumbling across, well, anywhere really.

Posted by: Sean M. at 09:29 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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