TEDxDeExtinction
Michael Archer: How we'll resurrect the gastric brooding frog, the Tasmanian tiger
Filmed:
Readability: 3.5
592,203 views
The gastric brooding frog lays its eggs just like any other frog -- then swallows them whole to incubate. That is, it did until it went extinct 30 years ago. Paleontologist Michael Archer makes a case to bring back the gastric brooding frog and the thylacine, commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger.
Michael Archer - Paleontologist
Paleontologist Michael Archer is working to bring back his favorite extinct animal: the Tasmanian tiger. Full bio
Paleontologist Michael Archer is working to bring back his favorite extinct animal: the Tasmanian tiger. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
00:12
I do want to test this question we're all interested in:
0
684
3109
00:15
Does extinction have to be forever?
1
3793
2812
00:18
I'm focused on two projects I want to tell you about.
2
6605
2942
00:21
One is the Thylacine Project.
3
9547
1840
00:23
The other one is the Lazarus Project,
4
11387
1688
00:25
and that's focused on the gastric brooding frog.
5
13075
2417
00:27
And it would be a fair question to ask, well,
6
15492
2017
00:29
why have we focused on these two animals?
7
17509
2667
00:32
Well, point number one, each of them
8
20176
2987
00:35
represents a unique family of its own.
9
23163
2553
00:37
We've lost a whole family.
10
25716
1415
00:39
That's a big chunk of the global genome gone.
11
27131
2628
00:41
I'd like it back.
12
29759
1603
00:43
The second reason is that we killed these things.
13
31362
4325
00:47
In the case of the thylacine, regrettably,
14
35687
3181
00:50
we shot every one that we saw. We slaughtered them.
15
38868
3550
00:54
In the case of the gastric brooding frog,
16
42418
2400
00:56
we may have "fungicided" it to death.
17
44818
2909
00:59
There's a dreadful fungus that's sort of moving
18
47727
1877
01:01
through the world that's called the chytrid fungus,
19
49604
1949
01:03
and it's nailing frogs all over the world.
20
51553
2755
01:06
We think that's probably what got this frog,
21
54308
1959
01:08
and humans are spreading this fungus.
22
56267
2644
01:10
And this introduces a very important ethical point,
23
58911
2770
01:13
and I think you will have heard this many times
24
61681
1900
01:15
when this topic comes up.
25
63581
1974
01:17
What I think is important is that,
26
65555
2420
01:19
if it's clear that we exterminated these species,
27
67975
3121
01:23
then I think we not only have a moral obligation
28
71096
3269
01:26
to see what we can do about it, but I think we've got
29
74365
1939
01:28
a moral imperative to try to do something, if we can.
30
76304
4063
01:32
Okay. Let me talk to you about the Lazarus Project.
31
80367
3139
01:35
It's a frog. And you think, frog.
32
83506
2735
01:38
Yeah, but this was not just any frog.
33
86241
3465
01:41
Unlike a normal frog, which lays its eggs in the water
34
89706
2993
01:44
and goes away and wishes its froglets well,
35
92699
2629
01:47
this frog swallowed its fertilized eggs,
36
95328
3540
01:50
swallowed them into the stomach where it should be having food,
37
98868
3649
01:54
didn't digest the eggs,
38
102517
1603
01:56
and turned its stomach into a uterus.
39
104120
3069
01:59
In the stomach, the eggs went on to develop into tadpoles,
40
107189
3281
02:02
and in the stomach, the tadpoles went on to develop into frogs,
41
110470
3823
02:06
and they grew in the stomach until eventually
42
114293
2752
02:09
the poor old frog was at risk of bursting apart.
43
117045
3117
02:12
It has a little cough and a hiccup, and out comes
44
120162
2210
02:14
sprays of little frogs.
45
122372
1845
02:16
Now, when biologists saw this, they were agog.
46
124217
2876
02:19
They thought, this is incredible.
47
127093
1874
02:20
No animal, let alone a frog, has been known to do this,
48
128967
3837
02:24
to change one organ in the body into another.
49
132804
2002
02:26
And you can imagine the medical world went nuts over this as well.
50
134806
3974
02:30
If we could understand how that frog is managing
51
138780
2860
02:33
the way its tummy works, is there information
52
141640
2481
02:36
here that we need to understand or could usefully use
53
144121
3015
02:39
to help ourselves?
54
147136
2237
02:41
Now, I'm not suggesting we want to raise our babies in our stomach,
55
149373
3062
02:44
but I am suggesting it's possible we might want
56
152435
1999
02:46
to manage gastric secretion in the gut.
57
154434
2389
02:48
And just as everybody got excited about it, bang!
58
156823
2908
02:51
It was extinct.
59
159731
2124
02:53
I called up my friend, Professor Mike Tyler
60
161855
2683
02:56
in the University of Adelaide.
61
164538
1129
02:57
He was the last person who had this frog,
62
165667
2562
03:00
a colony of these things, in his lab.
63
168229
2155
03:02
And I said, "Mike, by any chance -- "
64
170384
1691
03:04
this was 30 or 40 years ago —
65
172075
1401
03:05
"by any chance had you kept any frozen tissue of this frog?"
66
173476
3771
03:09
And he thought about it, and he went to his deep freezer,
67
177247
2922
03:12
minus 20 degrees centigrade,
68
180169
2160
03:14
and he poured through everything in the freezer,
69
182329
1541
03:15
and there in the bottom was a jar
70
183870
1740
03:17
and it contained tissues of these frogs.
71
185610
3040
03:20
This was very exciting, but there was no reason
72
188650
2893
03:23
why we should expect that this would work,
73
191543
1925
03:25
because this tissue had not had any antifreeze put in it,
74
193468
3947
03:29
cryoprotectants, to look after it when it was frozen.
75
197415
3772
03:33
And normally, when water freezes, as you know, it expands,
76
201187
2705
03:35
and the same thing happens in a cell.
77
203892
1471
03:37
If you freeze tissues, the water expands,
78
205363
2192
03:39
damages or bursts the cell walls.
79
207555
2405
03:41
Well, we looked at the tissue under the microscope.
80
209960
2231
03:44
It actually didn't look bad. The cell walls looked intact.
81
212191
2661
03:46
So we thought, let's give it a go.
82
214852
2099
03:48
What we did is something called
83
216951
1760
03:50
somatic cell nuclear transplantation.
84
218711
2818
03:53
We took the eggs of a related species, a living frog,
85
221529
3642
03:57
and we inactivated the nucleus of the egg.
86
225171
3101
04:00
We used ultraviolet radiation to do that.
87
228272
2556
04:02
And then we took the dead nucleus from the dead tissue
88
230828
3195
04:06
of the extinct frog and we inserted those nuclei into that egg.
89
234023
4312
04:10
Now by rights, this is kind of like a cloning project,
90
238335
3638
04:13
like what produced Dolly, but it's actually very different,
91
241973
2517
04:16
because Dolly was live sheep into live sheep cells.
92
244490
3084
04:19
That was a miracle, but it was workable.
93
247574
2292
04:21
What we're trying to do is take a dead nucleus from an extinct species
94
249866
3816
04:25
and put it into a completely different species and expect that to work.
95
253682
3486
04:29
Well, we had no real reason to expect it would,
96
257168
2273
04:31
and we tried hundreds and hundreds of these.
97
259441
3336
04:34
And just last February, the last time we did these trials,
98
262777
2830
04:37
I saw a miracle starting to happen.
99
265607
2827
04:40
What we found was, most of these eggs didn't work,
100
268434
3911
04:44
but then suddenly one of them began to divide.
101
272345
3026
04:47
That was so exciting. And then the egg divided again.
102
275371
3160
04:50
And then again. And pretty soon, we had
103
278531
2579
04:53
early stage embryos with hundreds of cells forming those.
104
281110
4421
04:57
We even DNA tested some of these cells,
105
285531
2443
04:59
and the DNA of the extinct frog is in those cells.
106
287974
4176
05:04
So we're very excited. This is not a tadpole.
107
292150
2101
05:06
It's not a frog. But it's a long way along the journey
108
294251
4333
05:10
to producing, or bringing back, an extinct species.
109
298584
2598
05:13
And this is news. We haven't announced this publicly before.
110
301182
2791
05:15
We're excited. We've got to get past this point.
111
303973
3262
05:19
We now want this ball of cells to start to gastrulate,
112
307235
2769
05:22
to turn in so that it will produce the other tissues.
113
310004
3122
05:25
It'll go on and produce a tadpole and then a frog.
114
313126
3462
05:28
Watch this space. I think we're going to have this frog
115
316588
2776
05:31
hopping glad to be back in the world again.
116
319364
2388
05:33
Thank you. (Applause)
117
321752
5812
05:39
We haven't done it yet, but keep those applause ready.
118
327564
3280
05:42
The second project I want to talk to you about is the Thylacine Project.
119
330844
4219
05:47
The thylacine looks a bit, to most people, like a dog,
120
335063
3908
05:50
or maybe like a tiger, because it has stripes.
121
338971
1771
05:52
But it's not related to any of those.
122
340742
2094
05:54
It's a marsupial. It raised its young in a pouch,
123
342836
2714
05:57
like a koala or a kangaroo would do,
124
345550
2326
05:59
and it has a long history, a long, fascinating history,
125
347876
5156
06:05
that goes back 25 million years.
126
353032
2804
06:07
But it's also a tragic history.
127
355836
2261
06:10
The first one that we see occurs in the ancient rainforests
128
358097
3911
06:14
of Australia about 25 million years ago,
129
362008
2927
06:16
and the National Geographic Society is helping us
130
364935
2902
06:19
to explore these fossil deposits. This is Riversleigh.
131
367837
3489
06:23
In those fossil rocks are some amazing animals.
132
371326
3065
06:26
We found marsupial lions.
133
374391
1930
06:28
We found carnivorous kangaroos.
134
376321
2710
06:31
It's not what you usually think about as a kangaroo,
135
379031
1662
06:32
but these are meat-eating kangaroos.
136
380693
1823
06:34
We found the biggest bird in the world,
137
382516
2515
06:37
bigger than that thing that was in Madagascar,
138
385031
2002
06:39
and it too was a flesh-eater. It was a giant, weird duck.
139
387033
4007
06:43
And crocodiles were not behaving at that time either.
140
391040
2877
06:45
You think of crocodiles as doing their ugly thing,
141
393917
2305
06:48
sitting in a pool of water.
142
396222
1499
06:49
These crocodiles were actually out on the land
143
397721
2652
06:52
and they were even climbing trees and jumping on prey
144
400373
3221
06:55
on the ground.
145
403594
1766
06:57
We had, in Australia, drop crocs. They really do exist.
146
405360
5070
07:02
But what they were dropping on was not only
147
410430
2150
07:04
other weird animals but also thylacines.
148
412580
2679
07:07
There were five different kinds of thylacines in those ancient forests,
149
415259
3663
07:10
and they ranged from great big ones to middle-sized ones
150
418922
4183
07:15
to one that was about the size of a chihuahua.
151
423105
3980
07:19
Paris Hilton would have been able to carry
152
427085
1713
07:20
one of these things around in a little handbag,
153
428798
2214
07:23
until a drop croc landed on her.
154
431012
2330
07:25
At any rate, it was a fascinating place,
155
433342
1977
07:27
but unfortunately, Australia didn't stay this way.
156
435319
2687
07:30
Climate change has affected the world for a long period of time,
157
438006
3618
07:33
and gradually, the forests disappeared,
158
441624
3015
07:36
the country began to dry out,
159
444639
1633
07:38
and the number of kinds of thylacines began to decline,
160
446272
2230
07:40
until by five million years ago, only one left.
161
448502
3096
07:43
By 10,000 years ago, they had disappeared
162
451598
1980
07:45
from New Guinea, and unfortunately
163
453578
3864
07:49
by 4,000 years ago, somebodies,
164
457442
3290
07:52
we don't know who this was, introduced dingoes --
165
460732
2969
07:55
this is a very archaic kind of a dog — into Australia.
166
463701
3190
07:58
And as you can see, dingoes are very similar
167
466891
2068
08:00
in their body form to thylacines.
168
468959
2195
08:03
That similarity meant they probably competed.
169
471154
3050
08:06
They were eating the same kinds of foods.
170
474204
1431
08:07
It's even possible that aborigines were keeping
171
475635
2566
08:10
some of these dingoes as pets, and therefore
172
478201
2893
08:13
they may have had an advantage in the battle for survival.
173
481094
2944
08:16
All we know is, soon after the dingoes were brought in,
174
484038
2507
08:18
thylacines were extinct in the Australian mainland,
175
486545
2605
08:21
and after that they only survived in Tasmania.
176
489150
4406
08:25
Then, unfortunately, the next sad part of the thylacine story
177
493556
3243
08:28
is that Europeans arrived in 1788, and they brought
178
496799
3049
08:31
with them the things they valued, and that included sheep.
179
499848
3953
08:35
They took one look at the thylacine in Tasmania,
180
503801
3215
08:39
and they thought, hang on, this is not going to work.
181
507016
3021
08:42
That guy is going to eat all our sheep.
182
510037
2805
08:44
That was not what happened, actually.
183
512842
1981
08:46
Wild dogs did eat a few of the sheep, but the thylacine got a bad rap.
184
514823
3822
08:50
But immediately, the government said, that's it,
185
518645
2377
08:53
let's get rid of them, and they paid people
186
521022
3317
08:56
to slaughter every one that they saw.
187
524339
1818
08:58
By the early 1930s, 3,000 to 4,000 thylacines
188
526157
5019
09:03
had been murdered. It was a disaster,
189
531176
3064
09:06
and they were about to hit the wall.
190
534240
2378
09:08
Have a look at this bit of film footage.
191
536618
3009
09:11
It makes me very sad, because, while, it's a fascinating animal,
192
539627
3779
09:15
and it's amazing to think that we had the technology to film it
193
543406
4962
09:20
before it actually plunged off that cliff of extinction,
194
548368
4100
09:24
we didn't, unfortunately, at this same time, have
195
552468
2829
09:27
a molecule of concern about the welfare for this species.
196
555297
3917
09:31
These are photos of the last surviving thylacine, Benjamin,
197
559214
3393
09:34
who was in the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart.
198
562607
2950
09:37
To add insult to injury, having swept this species
199
565557
3399
09:40
nearly off the table, this animal, when it died of neglect,
200
568956
4465
09:45
the keepers didn't let it into the hutch
201
573421
1924
09:47
on a cold night in Hobart. It died of exposure,
202
575345
4181
09:51
and in the morning, when they found the body of Benjamin,
203
579526
2308
09:53
they still cared so little for this animal
204
581834
3032
09:56
that they threw the body in the dump.
205
584866
3365
10:00
Does it have to stay this way?
206
588231
3061
10:03
In 1990, I was in the Australian Museum.
207
591292
2770
10:06
I was fascinated by thylacines. I've always been obsessed with these animals.
208
594062
3907
10:09
And I was studying skulls, trying to figure out
209
597969
1812
10:11
their relationships to other sorts of animals,
210
599781
2631
10:14
and I saw this jar, and here, in the jar,
211
602412
3381
10:17
was a little girl thylacine pup, perhaps six months old.
212
605793
4559
10:22
The guy who had found it and killed the mother
213
610352
2546
10:24
had pickled the pup and they pickled it in alcohol.
214
612898
3573
10:28
I'm a paleontologist, but I still knew alcohol was a DNA preservative.
215
616471
3702
10:32
But this was 1990, and I asked my geneticist friends,
216
620173
4083
10:36
couldn't we think about going into this pup
217
624256
2263
10:38
and extracting DNA, if it's there,
218
626519
3152
10:41
and then somewhere down the line in the future,
219
629671
1984
10:43
we'll use this DNA to bring the thylacine back?
220
631655
2115
10:45
The geneticists laughed. But this was six years before Dolly.
221
633770
4784
10:50
Cloning was science fiction. It had not happened.
222
638554
2927
10:53
But then suddenly cloning did happen.
223
641481
2650
10:56
And I thought, when I became director
224
644131
2036
10:58
of the Australian Museum, I'm going to give this a go.
225
646167
2435
11:00
I put a team together.
226
648602
1488
11:02
We went into that pup to see what was in there,
227
650090
3115
11:05
and we did find thylacine DNA. It was a eureka moment.
228
653205
3047
11:08
We were very excited.
229
656252
1018
11:09
Unfortunately, we also found a lot of human DNA.
230
657270
3879
11:13
Every old curator who'd been in that museum
231
661149
3117
11:16
had seen this wonderful specimen,
232
664266
1582
11:17
put their hand in the jar, pulled it out and thought,
233
665848
2192
11:20
"Wow, look at that," plop, dropped it back in the jar,
234
668040
2614
11:22
contaminating this specimen.
235
670654
1866
11:24
And that was a worry. If the goal here was to get the DNA out
236
672520
3693
11:28
and use the DNA down the track to try to bring a thylacine back,
237
676213
3747
11:31
what we didn't want happening when the information
238
679960
2647
11:34
was shoved into the machine and the wheel turned around
239
682607
1929
11:36
and the lights flashed, was to have a wizened old
240
684536
2363
11:38
horrible curator pop out the other end of the machine. (Laughter)
241
686899
3584
11:42
It would've kept the curator very happy,
242
690483
1658
11:44
but it wasn't going to keep us happy.
243
692141
1817
11:45
So we went back to these specimens and we started digging around,
244
693958
3199
11:49
and particularly we looked into the teeth of skulls,
245
697157
3281
11:52
hard parts where humans had not been able to get their fingers,
246
700438
3031
11:55
and we found much better quality DNA.
247
703469
2428
11:57
We found nuclear mitochondrial genes. It's there.
248
705897
2786
12:00
So we got it.
249
708683
1121
12:01
Okay. What could we do with this stuff?
250
709804
2284
12:04
Well, George Church in his book, "Regenesis,"
251
712088
2032
12:06
has mentioned many of the techniques that are rapidly advancing
252
714120
3359
12:09
to work with fragmented DNA.
253
717479
1766
12:11
We would hope that we'll be able to get that DNA back
254
719245
3084
12:14
into a viable form, and then, much like we've done with the Lazarus Project,
255
722329
3852
12:18
get that stuff into an egg of a host species.
256
726181
3806
12:21
It has to be a different species.
257
729987
1289
12:23
What could it be? Why couldn't it be a Tasmanian devil?
258
731276
2867
12:26
They're related distantly to thylacines.
259
734143
2137
12:28
And then the Tasmanian devil is going to pop
260
736280
2297
12:30
a thylacine out the south end.
261
738577
2711
12:33
Critics of this project say, hang on.
262
741288
2753
12:36
Thylacine, Tasmanian devil? That's going to hurt.
263
744041
4180
12:40
No, it's not. These are marsupials.
264
748221
3054
12:43
They give birth to babies that are the size of a jelly bean.
265
751275
2615
12:45
That Tasmanian devil's not even going to know it gave birth.
266
753890
3233
12:49
It is, shortly, going to think it's got the ugliest
267
757123
2971
12:52
Tasmanian devil baby in the world,
268
760094
1878
12:53
so maybe it'll need some help to keep it going.
269
761972
4091
12:58
Andrew Pask and his colleagues have demonstrated
270
766063
2653
13:00
this might not be a waste of time.
271
768716
1895
13:02
And it's sort of in the future, we haven't got there yet,
272
770611
2192
13:04
but it's the kind of thing we want to think about.
273
772803
1643
13:06
They took some of this same pickled thylacine DNA
274
774446
3686
13:10
and they spliced it into a mouse genome,
275
778132
3420
13:13
but they put a tag on it so that anything
276
781552
2560
13:16
that this thylacine DNA produced
277
784112
2799
13:18
would appear blue-green in the mouse baby.
278
786911
3222
13:22
In other words, if thylacine tissues were being produced
279
790133
2374
13:24
by the thylacine DNA, it would be able to be recognized.
280
792507
3408
13:27
When the baby popped up, it was filled with blue-green tissues.
281
795915
3916
13:31
And that tells us if we can get that genome back together,
282
799831
2732
13:34
get it into a live cell, it's going to produce thylacine stuff.
283
802563
4793
13:39
Is this a risk?
284
807356
1665
13:41
You've taken the bits of one animal
285
809021
2056
13:43
and you've mixed them into the cell of a different kind of an animal.
286
811077
2492
13:45
Are we going to get a Frankenstein?
287
813569
2139
13:47
You know, some kind of weird hybrid chimera?
288
815708
2596
13:50
And the answer is no.
289
818304
1487
13:51
If the only nuclear DNA that goes into this hybrid cell
290
819791
3413
13:55
is thylacine DNA, that's the only thing that can pop out
291
823204
2457
13:57
the other end of the devil.
292
825661
2392
14:00
Okay, if we can do this, could we put it back?
293
828053
4002
14:04
This is a key question for everybody.
294
832055
1781
14:05
Does it have to stay in a laboratory,
295
833836
1658
14:07
or could we put it back where it belongs?
296
835494
1683
14:09
Could we put it back in the throne of the king of beasts
297
837177
2569
14:11
in Tasmania where it belongs, restore that ecosystem?
298
839746
2656
14:14
Or has Tasmania changed so much
299
842402
2794
14:17
that that's no longer possible?
300
845196
1630
14:18
I've been to Tasmania. I've been to many of the areas
301
846826
3045
14:21
where the thylacines were common.
302
849871
1422
14:23
I've even spoken to people, like Peter Carter here,
303
851293
3235
14:26
who when I spoke to him was 90 years old,
304
854528
2461
14:28
but in 1926, this man and his father and his brother
305
856989
3710
14:32
caught thylacines. They trapped them.
306
860699
2876
14:35
And it just, when I spoke to this man,
307
863575
1814
14:37
I was looking in his eyes and thinking,
308
865389
2578
14:39
behind those eyes is a brain
309
867967
2119
14:42
that has memories of what thylacines feel like,
310
870086
4096
14:46
what they smelled like, what they sounded like.
311
874182
2462
14:48
He led them around on a rope.
312
876644
1538
14:50
He has personal experiences
313
878182
2098
14:52
that I would give my left leg to have in my head.
314
880280
3452
14:55
We'd all love to have this sort of thing happen.
315
883732
2503
14:58
Anyway, I asked Peter, by any chance,
316
886235
2296
15:00
could he take us back to where he caught those thylacines.
317
888531
2448
15:02
My interest was in whether the environment had changed.
318
890979
2443
15:05
He thought hard. I mean, it was nearly 80 years before this
319
893422
3052
15:08
that he'd been at this hut.
320
896474
1317
15:09
At any rate, he led us down this bush track,
321
897791
2055
15:11
and there, right where he remembered, was the hut,
322
899846
3437
15:15
and tears came into his eyes.
323
903283
2570
15:17
He looked at the hut. We went inside.
324
905853
1398
15:19
There were the wooden boards on the sides of the hut
325
907251
2103
15:21
where he and his father and his brother had slept at night.
326
909354
2844
15:24
And he told me, as it all was flooding back in memories.
327
912198
2643
15:26
He said, "I remember the thylacines going around the hut
328
914841
3007
15:29
wondering what was inside," and he said
329
917848
2376
15:32
they made sounds like "Yip! Yip! Yip!"
330
920224
2531
15:34
All of these are parts of his life and what he remembers.
331
922755
3172
15:37
And the key question for me was to ask Peter,
332
925927
3078
15:41
has it changed? And he said no.
333
929005
1975
15:42
The southern beech forests surrounded his hut
334
930980
1956
15:44
just like it was when he was there in 1926.
335
932936
2715
15:47
The grasslands were sweeping away.
336
935651
1993
15:49
That's classic thylacine habitat.
337
937644
1859
15:51
And the animals in those areas were the same
338
939503
2142
15:53
that were there when the thylacine was around.
339
941645
1839
15:55
So could we put it back? Yes.
340
943484
3168
15:58
Is that all we would do? And this is an interesting question.
341
946652
3099
16:01
Sometimes you might be able to put it back,
342
949751
2812
16:04
but is that the safest way to make sure
343
952563
1813
16:06
it never goes extinct again, and I don't think so.
344
954376
2852
16:09
I think gradually, as we see species all around the world,
345
957228
2851
16:12
it's kind of a mantra that wildlife is increasingly
346
960079
3274
16:15
not safe in the wild.
347
963353
1200
16:16
We'd love to think it is, but we know it isn't.
348
964553
2070
16:18
We need other parallel strategies coming online.
349
966623
2633
16:21
And this one interests me.
350
969256
1255
16:22
Some of the thylacines that were being turned into zoos,
351
970511
2612
16:25
sanctuaries, even at the museums,
352
973123
2053
16:27
had collar marks on the neck.
353
975176
2140
16:29
They were being kept as pets,
354
977316
2112
16:31
and we know a lot of bush tales and memories
355
979428
3060
16:34
of people who had them as pets,
356
982488
1396
16:35
and they say they were wonderful, friendly.
357
983884
2325
16:38
This particular one came in out of the forest
358
986209
2843
16:41
to lick this boy and curled up
359
989052
2513
16:43
around the fireplace to go to sleep. A wild animal.
360
991565
2875
16:46
And I'd like to ask the question, all of --
361
994440
2814
16:49
we need to think about this.
362
997254
1310
16:50
If it had not been illegal to keep these thylacines as pets
363
998564
4520
16:55
then, would the thylacine be extinct now?
364
1003084
3265
16:58
And I'm positive it wouldn't.
365
1006349
1964
17:00
We need to think about this in today's world.
366
1008313
2705
17:03
Could it be that getting animals close to us
367
1011018
3026
17:06
so that we value them, maybe they won't go extinct?
368
1014044
3293
17:09
And this is such a critical issue for us,
369
1017337
2028
17:11
because if we don't do that, we're going to watch
370
1019365
2554
17:13
more of these animals plunge off the precipice.
371
1021919
3088
17:17
As far as I'm concerned, this is why
372
1025007
2054
17:19
we're trying to do these kinds of de-extinction projects.
373
1027061
3338
17:22
We are trying to restore that balance of nature
374
1030399
3243
17:25
that we have upset.
375
1033642
1900
17:27
Thank you.
376
1035542
1357
17:28
(Applause)
377
1036899
2774
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Michael Archer - PaleontologistPaleontologist Michael Archer is working to bring back his favorite extinct animal: the Tasmanian tiger.
Why you should listen
Why do fascinating extinct species have to stay that way? Paleontologist Michael Archer says: They don't! He's working to de-extinct the gastric brooding frog and the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger. These animals could have taught us humans a lot, says Archer, but we wiped them out. A severe missed opportunity.
Archer is a professor in the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Archer's research includes: conservation through sustainable use of native resources -- including having native animals as pets -- and trying to bring extinct species back into the world of the living. Previously Archer served as the Curator of Mammals at the Queensland Museum and Director of the Australian Museum in Sydney.
Michael Archer | Speaker | TED.com