History rarely gives us a chance to right wrongs.

But thanks to cloning, we just may have that opportunity by bringing back the animals that humans helped kill off.

At evolutionary molecular biologist Beth Shapiro’s lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz, researchers are working toward just that, and several believe we’re on the cusp of the world’s first “de-extinction.”

What will be the first animal brought back from the dead? Scientists have already mapped the genome of the passenger pigeon, a once-common bird in North America wiped out by deforestation and hunting. And no animal grabs the imagination more than the creature in the title of Shapiro’s new book, “How to Clone a Mammoth.”

But asked what she’d most like to see brought back, Shapiro answers quickly, “The dodo.”

That’s because there is little doubt that the dodo went extinct in large part because of us.

“The dodo is a special case for de-extinction,” Shapiro writes, “because it, more than any other species, is the international symbol of human-caused extinction.”

The poor, ill-fated dodo bird once lived peacefully on its native island of Mauritius. When humans arrived, they brought with them dogs, rats and cats. The dodo, “a large flightless pigeon,” had always laid its eggs in the mud. But now, with its newly introduced predatory neighbors, those eggs could no longer safely mature.

From 1638, when the Dutch settled in Mauritius, until 1662, when the last dodo died off, only 24 years passed.

Before we get to the “should we?” scientists need to solve the “can we?”

Cloning animals is not as simple as pop culture suggests.

The dodo’s home Mauritius, for example, is a warm climate where the preservation of any DNA would be virtually impossible. Although a few taxidermied dodos live on in museums, preserved tissue isn’t the same thing as preserved DNA. Similarly, the “Jurassic Park” myth of dinosaur DNA living in the blood of a mosquito preserved in amber is just that, a myth. Even in ice, while DNA has a better chance of longevity, scientists continue to find that no matter how well preserved the specimen, the DNA is often in shambles.

The oldest DNA ever found was that of a 700,000-year-old horse. Shapiro was a part of the team that managed to extract that ancient DNA from its frozen bones. The chances of finding 65 million-year-old dinosaur DNA is categorically impossible.

Take, also, the “bucardo,” a species of wild goat native to the Iberian Peninsula known as the Pyrenean ibex.

The species died out in 2000, when an elderly female named Celia passed away. Scientists were prepared — they transferred 782 of Celia’s somatic cells into eggs and produced 407 embryos. Two hundred and eight of these embryos made it into hosts.

But that’s where the good news ends.

“Only one pregnancy lasted to term,” writes Shapiro, “and the baby bucardo that was born only lived for 10 minutes.”

The bucardo cloning experiment succeeded in that the extinct bucardo was momentarily un-extinct. But today the bucardo is as dead as the dodo bird, and the possibility of bringing it back again are only slightly better.

But there is still hope for the mammoth, which thrived comparatively recently 10,000 years ago. The last wooly mammoth roamed the earth around 3,600 years ago — a blink of an eye (in evolutionary biology terms).

Bringing a mammoth back from extinction is a fairly straightforward process. In her TED talk on de-extinction, Shapiro says, “The first question we have to ask is, can we sequence the complete genome of these extinct animals?”

Once we’ve done that, she points out, all we have to do is get that genome into some chromosomes; then get those chromosomes into a cell; then make those cells divide into an embryo; then put that embryo into a surrogate.

Sounds simple. However, each of those steps presents a world of complication. To begin with, finding a complete genome has its own set of challenges. With the bucardo, scientists had access to Celia. Unless someone’s hiding a mammoth somewhere, the task is a lot harder.

Shapiro points out that even our understanding of the human genome remains incomplete. We’ve sequenced 99% of it but still struggle at that last 1%. When it comes to the mammoth, in 2008 scientists sequenced 3.3 billion base pairs of mammoth DNA — 50% of it. That’s remarkable when you consider that the 4,000-year-old mammoth DNA is almost always heavily damaged.

To compare, imagine that the DNA scientists were able to take from Celia was a long, sturdy rope. The mammoth DNA, collected from mammoth bones excavated in Siberia, is like trampled confetti, Shapiro writes.

In the meantime, there are other ways to bring parts of these animals back from the dead. Scientists at Harvard, led by geneticist George Church, have successfully inserted 14 mammoth genes into the tissue of an Asian elephant.

The ultimate goal: A slightly modified elephant with smaller ears, thicker fur and an extra layer of fat. By using what we know of mammoth DNA, Church’s hope is to create a species of elephant better protected from humans and habitat destruction by creating an animal able to survive where we don’t want to go; namely, arctic environments.

Shapiro also explores a method that some scientists are using called “back-breeding.” The idea is to breed lost traits back into distant relatives of extinct animals.

A Dutch scientist named Henri Kerkdijk-Otten has been using back-breeding in an effort to recreate an approximation of an extinct species of wild cow called an auroch. Ten thousand years ago, aurochs were domesticated, however over time much of what had been an “auroch” was bred out.

So Kerkdijk-Otten decided to breed it back in. Using animals that have distinctly auroch-like traits, he began his attempt to engineer an auroch back to life.

“The end product will not contain the genome sequence of a purebred auroch,” writes Shapiro. “It will, however, most definitely look like an auroch.”

That begs the question: What constitutes a true de-extinction? Is an almost-auroch an actual auroch? If any mammoth we bring back from the dead requires the help of an elephant, will it truly be a mammoth? Shapiro believes no. However, what scientists can learn from these efforts might prove of equal importance.

Perhaps the most remarkable development in our quest to remake life has been to make life outright. In 2010, a biochemist, geneticist and entrepreneur by the name of J. Craig Venter lead a team of scientists to manufacture the first synthetic genome — life from scratch. They actually created a free-living bacterium, by transplanting their synthetic genome into a prepared cell.

The implications of Venter’s breakthrough certainly inspire all kinds of fantasies, both tantalizing and terrifying. Perhaps some day, the ability to create living organisms, maybe even “dinosaurs” of our own invention, will be at our fingertips.

So we overcome all the obstacles and bring back a mammoth. What do we do with it?

Shapiro cautions against locking these majestic animals up in zoos. She cites the often-premature deaths of zoo-housed elephants, whose lives are exponentially shorter in captivity.

Mammoths are in many ways, larger, hairier elephants and would likely experience a lot of the same psychological complications if kept in cages.

“Our ultimate goal should be to reintroduce de-extinct species into a natural habitat,” Shapiro writes.

To that end, Russia has already set aside a plot of land earmarked for the return of the mammoth. The 99-square mile Pleistocene Park in northeastern Siberia is currently under development. Russian researcher Sergey Zimov has spent the last 25 years trying to recreate the subarctic ecosystem in which mammoths once thrived.

Bringing the passenger pigeon back would pose similar issues. Shapiro explains there is little chance of re-releasing the passenger pigeon into today’s world, “without causing ecological mayhem.”

Whether or not we see the rebirth of the mammoth, the passenger pigeon or the dodo in our lifetime, our quest might help us to conserve, or at least better appreciate the world we have right now. The San Diego Zoo houses a room that some are calling a modern day Noah’s Ark. Here the DNA of thousands of the planet’s most rare plants and animals are kept under deep freeze in suspended animation.

Shapiro isn’t sure they will be able to resurrect the recently extinct or almost-extinct any time soon. But for now she hopes that these frozen DNA vials locked in time might serve a more pressing purpose.

“What if we could resurrect diversity?” she asks. “What if we could use the DNA of the extinct to use as a genetic booster shot?”

In other words, she sees the potential for these species someday helping us to make their living genetic cousins stronger. “These are great weapons that we will soon have in our arsenal.”

When it comes to cloning the extinct, Shapiro remains skeptical. But what she does see is hope for the animals that are alive on earth today. With everything we are learning from our quest for de-extinction perhaps we will accomplish another important result.

“Let’s focus on what’s living,” Shapiro says, “give them a better chance at survival.”