Jurassic Park has a lot to answer for. It made the idea seem so simple. Take the DNA from a microscopic drop of dinosaur blood, preserved for 65 million years in the gut of a mosquito trapped in fossilised amber. Carry out a bit of jiggery-pokery involving chaos theory and Jeff Goldblum. Insert the dino DNA into the yolk of a crocodile’s egg and leave to incubate. Soon you’ll have a thriving menagerie of once-extinct beasts roaming the jungles of someone’s private theme park… De-extinction, or the idea of bringing extinct species back from the dead, has come a long way over the quarter century since Jurassic Park was first published. It has now matured into a quasi-serious science and has even been the subject of its own TEDx conference. Of course, no-one is talking about bringing back dinosaurs- their DNA is lost for good- but some scientists are proposing to resurrect a range of other, more-recently extinct species such as the passenger pigeon and the gastric-brooding frog, both lost within living memory… “If it works, de-extinction will only target a few species and it’s very expensive. Will it divert conservation dollars from true conservation measures that already work, which are already short of funds?” asks David Ehrenfeld, professor of biology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. “At this moment brave conservationists are already risking their lives to protect dwindling groups of African forest elephants from heavily-armed poachers, and here we are talking about bringing back the woolly mammoth. Think about it.”