AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Now, a story about how a chance encounter in an Australian museum may help bring back the extinct Tasmanian tiger. Here's science reporter, Ari Daniel.
ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: Biologist Andrew Pask spends a lot of time at the Melbourne Museum. A few years ago wandering the collections, he and his colleagues came across a 110-year-old baby Tasmanian tiger preserved in ethanol. The animal's also known as a thylacine.
ANDREW PASK: So thylacine is a marsupial, but it looks almost exactly like a canid or a dog. It was the only marsupial apex predator that we had. When it was hunted to extinction, it left an enormous gap in the ecosystem.
DANIEL: Pask works for Colossal Biosciences, a biotech company attempting to bring back species that have gone extinct, including the thylacine. but it ain't easy.
PASK: We still can't create life where there is none, so we can't magically reanimate our thylacine cells. So the way that de-extinction (ph) science works is you have to start with living material.
DANIEL: Meaning DNA. That baby provided Pask with fragments of genetic material, but he needed a more complete genome to actually try to make a Tasmanian tiger. Well, it turned out the baby didn't show up at the museum alone. It had been found in the pouch of its mother.
PASK: They shot the mom. They brought her in, they prepared her pelt for taxidermy, and when they'd finished doing the pelt preparation, they literally sawed her head off and then dropped that into a bucket of ethanol.
DANIEL: Six or so months ago, Pask found this skinned head at the back of a collection cupboard in the museum.
PASK: Despite the thing looking pretty gruesome, it's actually an incredibly well-preserved specimen that had really intact DNA, which was fantastic for our ability to build a genome.
DANIEL: Pask then looked for the thylacine's closest living relative, a mouse-sized marsupial called a fat-tailed dunnart. He and his team are now taking cells from the dunnart and tweaking its DNA to resemble that of the thylacine. The group's focusing its initial edits with the help of AI on the genes that control skull shape, body plan, and body size.
PASK: To really give it that thylacine shape. And once you finish going through that editing process, you have a thylacine cell.
DANIEL: It will be a very early step towards possibly recreating the entire animal. The preserved thylacine head also contains RNA, a more fragile kind of genetic material that could give Pask a host of other clues to help try to replicate the animal.
PASK: From that RNA, we can actually tell how its taste receptors worked. The eye - so we can have a look at what sort of vision it had. The nose - that can tell us how it was able to smell and perceive its environment.
DANIEL: The technology being developed could be used to help conserve existing species that are threatened or endangered, says Ben Lamm, the co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences. He also sees de-extinction as a means of righting the historical wrong of the hunting that killed off the thylacine.
BEN LAMM: This is a huge opportunity for us to bring back a extinct species and undo the sins of the past.
DANIEL: This approach has its skeptics. Lynn Rothschild is a biologist at Brown University.
LYNN ROTHSCHILD: We have this idea of some kind of state of nature. But what really is natural? Is it having a world run by dinosaurs? Is it even having life at all? And so I don't believe that we can pick and choose, like a cafeteria menu, which organisms we want from which time and put them together to make ourselves feel better.
DANIEL: Rothschild acknowledges the conservation argument, but she worries what it'll mean for the resurrected thylacines that open their eyes on a changed world.
ROTHSCHILD: One does really need to balance what the pros and cons are, and I'm not sure it's really worth it, particularly for the larger sort of animals that do have sentience and feelings. Is this really the right thing to do?
DANIEL: Colossal Biosciences began their Tasmanian tiger de-extinction project two years ago, predicting they'd have an actual animal within the decade. The company says they may now be ahead of schedule. For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel.
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