Extinction

by Douglas Preston

It was a scene straight out of the Ice Age, the family of mammoths lingering in a lush meadow bordering the pond, with the glittering, snowcapped peaks of the Erebus Mountains of Colorado forming a majestic backdrop.

by the gnawing and tree-felling of giant beavers, Castoroides, another animal that had been “de-extincted,” in the jargon of the Erebus Resort.

Glyptodons were giant armadillos, the same size and shape as a Volkswagen Beetle.

Olivia was dying to see a woolly indricothere. It was the latest animal Erebus had de-extincted, and there were supposed to be two of them in the valley.

There were no maintained trails or developed campsites in Erebus; that was one of its attractions: you felt like you were a John Muir exploring an unknown and untouched land.

Agent Cash and Sheriff Colcord.

“The Erebus Project was initiated by myself sixteen years ago. I was formerly the director and founder of the celebrated Mammoth Project at MIT, which de-extincted the first woolly mammoth. It died, of course, but it was still one of the great biological milestones in history—as you undoubtedly know.”

“We shared a vision for creating a park and populating it with de-extincted megafauna from the Pleistocene age—a safari-style park modeled on the great game parks of Africa, with no fences, where visitors could experience the rewilded animals in their natural habitat.”

“We’ve de-extincted six mammal species so far. Would you care to see?”

Do not talk to me about Jurassic Park!” He almost spit out the name. “What we do here is real.”

“How do you resurrect an extinct creature?”

we took a fertilized Asian elephant embryo, cut and pasted the mammoth genes into the elephant genes in the embryo, while snipping out the genes specific only to the elephant. “Fourth, we implanted the embryo into the womb of a living female elephant. “And fifth, the surrogate mother elephant gave birth to a woolly mammoth calf.”

In fact, the most dangerous animals in Africa aren’t lions and leopards but elephants, buffalo, hippos, and rhinos—all herbivores.

“This just reinforces what I was thinking: we need a no-knock warrant.”

He and other anthropologists had developed a set of six criteria for determining if a set of human remains had been cannibalized or not.

“The point is,” Romanski said, “the bodies were processed to extract every gram of nourishment. That’s a characteristic of cannibalism in prehistoric times, when food was scarce. Deer and other food animals were similarly processed.”

“It makes all the difference in the world. Out of empathy springs cooperation, compassion, and altruism.

“We needed to de-extinct them to identify and isolate the Neander genes for the physical skills we desired—strength, coordination, speed, endurance. You have to see how these genes are expressed in vivo—it’s not something you can do in a test tube.”

“And then what?” asked Colcord. “What are you doing with those genes? Who’s getting them?” Cash had a sudden revelation: she knew the answer. “Erebus bills itself as a honeymoon destination,” she said. A sudden silence. “Oh my God,” said Romanski, “you’re making designer babies!”

“They are not ‘designer babies,’” Karman erupted angrily. “We’re guiding our species to a brilliant new future. No more sickness, genetic disease, obesity, addiction, or cancer. No more ugly, weak, or stupid people. No more depression or mental illness. These brave young couples are phase one in the plan, and their fees are financing our vital work!”

through resurrecting Homo neanderthalensis, an extinct hominin species that occupied Eurasia hundreds of thousands of years ago.

When modern humans arrived in Europe is debatable, but the earliest modern human bones—found in Bulgaria, Italy, and Britain—date to around 45,000 years ago.* Following that time, modern humans began pouring into Europe and reproducing at

an ever-increasing rate. Neanderthals, who had successfully lived in Europe for over 300,000 years, went extinct 39,000 years ago—that is, around six thousand years later. The

While Extinction is fiction, the science in it is real. It is here, and it is now.

If Neanderthals haven’t already been de-extincted somewhere on earth, they will be soon. Extinction is a way for me to say to readers: welcome to the Island of Dr. Moreau.