A traveller marvelling at snow leopards in a conservation park. A foodie who wants to taste pangolins without breaking the law. A game hunter tracking a black rhino which will be replenished after the kill.

To some people, these scenarios seem like dystopian nightmares. To others, they’re exciting prospects. And as the science advances, they may be more feasible than they might first appear. Some researchers are even exploring how animal cloning could change the tourism industry by 2070.

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State of the art

A Jurassic Park situation of dinosaurs once more roaming the Earth remains a fantasy. De-extinction is incredibly challenging and it’s not clear whether dinosaur DNA even can be recovered. With current technology, DNA samples only remain useful for about 1 million years – so theoretically we could clone a Neanderthal, but not a Triceratops last seen 65 million years ago.

Woolly mammoth DNA is more accessible. We have flash-frozen mammoth samples and can implant the genetic material into elephants, which are genetically similar. We can’t actually bring mammoths back in habitats resembling their original ones, though, where they could breed naturally.