Bring back the auroch
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Auroch were huge wild cattle that once roamed wild across Europe. But now scientists in Poland have unveiled plans to attempt to bring back to life the giant beasts, which were hunted to extinction nearly 400 years ago
The Jurassic Park-type experiment will use the DNA from the skull of the last known auroch in Europe – otherwise known as the urus – which died in Poland in 1627 and is now on display in a museum in Stockholm, Sweden.
The project is the brainchild of the Human Genetics Institute at the Academy of Sciences in Poznan, western Poland.
“Before we can proceed, however, we need to experiment on mice and rabbits to find out if the DNA can function in the desired manner,” Professor Ryszard Slomski told Poland’s TVN24 news channel.
The auroch, an ancestor of the modern-day domestic cattle, grew to 2 metres tall and weighed anything up to 1,000 kilogrammes.
The possibility of scientists bringing extinct species back to life has been mooted since geneticists announced in 2008 that they had successfully decoded almost all of the genome of the woolly mammoth, from 60,000-year-old remains found frozen in Siberia.
If the Poznan-based scientists' attempt to bring the auroch back to the forests of Poland is successful, then they say that it could also be possible to bring the flightless dodo or the wholly mammoth back as well.
