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Books

If we recreate the mammoth, it will be 99.999 per cent white elephant

Even if we could bring back the woolly mammoth (for one), where would it live?, asks Caspar Henderson. And do we really want it anyway?

16 May 2015

9:00 AM

16 May 2015

9:00 AM

How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-extinction Beth Shapiro

Princeton, pp.220, £16.95, ISBN: 9780691157054

Years ago, in an ill-conceived attempt to break into natural history radio, I borrowed a nearly dead car from a friend in West Hollywood and drove across town to the Los Angeles Zoo to report on a project to save the California condor from extinction. By the 1980s the number of condors had — thanks in part to the birds’ tendency to fly into live power lines — plunged to a few tens, and the species was on the brink.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £14.95 Tel: 08430 600033. Caspar Henderson is the author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. He is writing A New Map of Wonders.

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