It may sound cool to bring back the woolly mammoth after thousands of years of extinction — but Douglas Preston, the author of a novel that features the revival of the mammoths, has his doubts.
“If you take this and game it out to its logical end, you’re going to end up with something really terrifying,” Preston says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.
That realization led him to write “Extinction,” a fictional tale that wraps the genetic resurrection of woolly mammoths and other extinct species from the Pleistocene Era into a murder mystery.
“‘Extinction’ does not have any science fiction in it,” the 67-year-old author insists. “This really is actual science that’s being done right now. It is here, and the ability to resurrect these extinct animals is here. … Maybe in my lifetime, we are going to see a de-extincted woolly mammoth, or a creature that looks a lot like a woolly mammoth.”