We are in a period of human-led mass extinction, as species of insect, plant, mammal bird and fish slowly fade from memory, is there any hope of returning the planet to a more natural state?
Will de-extinction technologies every be scalable enough to re-wild entire ecosystems? And could new ways of extracting DNA answer some age old questions?
Beth Shapiro is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of California Santa Cruz Paleogenomics Lab
