00:00What do Paris Hilton and Chris Hemsworth have in common?
00:03Apparently, they both want to bring animals back to life.
00:07But it's not about making your favorite animal live forever.
00:11No, these celebrities help a scientific company
00:14to bring back to life animals that no longer exist,
00:17like the mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger,
00:20and even the emblematic dodo.
00:23If everything goes as planned,
00:26these fascinating creatures could come back to live among us by 2028.
00:31This revolutionary project is led by a company called Colossal Biosciences.
00:36Right now, these researchers are working on a way
00:39to bring back to life the genes of hundreds of animals
00:42that disappeared from the Earth a very long time ago.
00:45The idea is to reproduce these genes
00:47by using the DNA of a contemporary relative.
00:50If all of this seems completely incomprehensible to you,
00:53we will explain everything to you.
00:56The mammoth is therefore one of the animals they plan to bring back to life,
01:00and people are particularly enthusiastic about this subject.
01:03These gigantic and fascinating creatures
01:05traveled through certain regions of Africa, Europe, Asia,
01:09and North America until about 4,000 years ago.
01:13If you confuse them with modern elephants,
01:15know that there are essential differences between them.
01:18First of all, they had large curved defenses inside
01:22that were used to dig to find food.
01:25They were also able to survive in glacial climates.
01:29They had, for example, two thick layers of fur
01:32to keep their blood warm.
01:34Mammoths and elephants, however, have many things in common.
01:37The mammoth rhino shares 80-19.5% of its genes
01:41with its closest relative, the Asian elephant.
01:43This is very important, because it means that mammoths
01:46are genetically closer to Asian elephants
01:48than Asian elephants are to African elephants, for example.
01:52The company's bold project is to create a hybrid mammoth-elephant
01:56that would look exactly like those that once traveled the planet.
02:00This animal will look like a rhino mammoth,
02:03walk like it, and even make the sound of a rhino mammoth,
02:06but above all, it will be able to live in the same ecosystem
02:09as the original mammoth.
02:10If scientists manage to recreate enough of these creatures,
02:14one of their main objectives
02:16will be to contribute to restoring the ecosystem of the Arctic tundra.
02:21But how do they plan to recreate the mammoth?
02:24Here is their idea.
02:25First, they must find well-preserved samples of rhino mammoths
02:29in places like Alaska, for example.
02:32Then, they will have to sequence the mammoth's genome
02:35and that of its closest relative, the Asian elephant.
02:38The next step is to identify the important genes
02:41that have allowed the rhino mammoth to adapt to extreme temperatures,
02:45such as its curly hair, its curved defenses,
02:48and its dome-shaped skull.
02:50In other words, they must identify the genes
02:53that allow the mammoth to be a mammoth.
02:56Here is now the interesting step.
02:58They will use cutting-edge genetic editing tools,
03:01a bit like scissors,
03:03to cut the Asian elephant's DNA
03:05and replace certain areas with the mammoth's genes.
03:09This will allow them to create a new cellular line
03:13and, later, an embryo.
03:15This embryo will develop inside an Asian elephant
03:18in good health, which will be the carrier mother.
03:21And this is how a whole new elephant adapted to the cold will be born.
03:25At least, that's what scientists hope.
03:28Specialists predict that this 2.0 mammoth
03:32will arrive on Earth in 2028.
03:35If it takes time,
03:36it's because the elephant's gestation period is about 22 months.
03:41But if this deadline seems too far away to you,
03:43a little surprise may be waiting for us much earlier.
03:46Indeed, some of the other animals they plan to bring back to life
03:50have a much shorter gestation period,
03:53like the thylacine,
03:54also known as the Tasmanian tiger.
03:58The company is doing everything it can
04:01to give this animal a chance to come back to life.
04:04And the good news is that the process seems to be going well.
04:08Recently, the group announced that the Tasmanian tiger's genome
04:12was 99% complete.
04:15This animal came from the Australian continent
04:17and the islands of Tasmania and New Guinea.
04:20A large part of the Tasmanian tiger population
04:23disappeared more than 3,000 years ago,
04:25but about 5,000 of them managed to survive
04:28until a recent date.
04:31It is thought that the last thylacine died in 1936.
04:37To bring the Tasmanian tiger back to life,
04:39scientists first need a sample of the old animal.
04:43So they took RNA molecules from a 110-year-old preserved head
04:47and kept it in ethanol.
04:51The team was very lucky,
04:53because it is rare to find such well-preserved ancient samples,
04:57and they were able to use advanced DNA analysis techniques.
05:01And by that, I mean that they did a complete analysis.
05:05By studying RNA samples from large tissue areas
05:09such as the tongue, nasal cavity, brain and eyes,
05:13the experts were able to learn a number of interesting things
05:16about the Tasmanian tiger.
05:19They were able to understand the functioning of its brain,
05:22as well as what this animal could feel, see and taste.
05:26In addition, these semi-nocturnal animals had a particular appetite
05:30for small rodents, lizards and birds.
05:33After finding the perfect sample,
05:35the reconstruction process will be about the same as for the mammoth.
05:39But the donor of DNA will not be an elephant, of course.
05:43In the case of the Tasmanian tiger,
05:45the closest living relative is a small marsupial
05:48called Dunarth at foot and three.
05:51Although small, this animal is a ferocious carnivore.
05:55The experts therefore think that the DNA editing process
05:58will work perfectly with its sequence.
06:01The goal is to transform a Dunarth cell at foot and three
06:04into a Thylacine cell.
06:07To do this, they must bring more than 300 genetic modifications
06:11to a single Dunarth cell.
06:13They therefore have no doubt that they are doing everything in their power
06:16so that the dream of bringing these animals back to life becomes a reality.
06:21This project also plans to bring back the emblematic dodo.
06:25You know, this funny bird native to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.
06:31But here, things are getting complicated.
06:34Because we don't know much about this creature
06:36whose origins date back to about 23 million years ago.
06:40The only clues we have about the appearance of the dodos
06:43at the time they lived
06:45come from a handful of drawings, paintings
06:48and descriptions dating from the 17th century.
06:51But since these images are all very different from each other
06:55and that only a few of them were made from real living dodos,
06:59we are still not 100% sure what they really looked like.
07:04As for their behavior, we don't know much about it either.
07:08This is why it will be very interesting and very instructive
07:11to bring back this creature that has disappeared for so long.
07:15The sample used to extract an old genome of a dodo
07:18comes from a skull from the collection of the Museum of Natural History of Denmark.
07:22The closest relative of the living dodo,
07:24which will provide the high cells,
07:26is the pigeon of Nicobar,
07:28a bird with coloured feathers found in the Andaman Islands and Nicobar, in India.
07:34If all goes well, in a few years,
07:37we may be able to see the fabulous and legendary dodo with our own eyes.
07:43Bringing animals back to life may seem impossible,
07:46but science and technology can make a difference.
07:50Not only by protecting current species,
07:53but also by bringing animals back to life that have disappeared a long time ago.
07:58In fact, we have already made it.
08:02A wild goat known as the Bouquetin des Pyrénées
08:06went extinct in the year 2000.
08:08But three years later,
08:10scientists managed to bring it back to life
08:13using a method quite similar to the one we just talked about.
08:16It took 57 attempts,
08:18but one of them finally worked,
08:21and a clone of the Bouquetin des Pyrénées was born.
08:24Unfortunately, the animal only lived 10 minutes.
08:27You may think that the project has failed,
08:30but it was actually a big step forward in the field of animal rehabilitation.
08:34Now, specialists can only hope that the projects aimed at bringing back the dodo,
08:39mammoth and tiger from Tasmania, will go a little better.
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