It started with birds. We named the first one Martha, a nod to her namesake, the last of the passenger pigeons, who died in 1914. Then, we went for a whole flock of ‘em and Carolina parakeets and Ivory-billed woodpeckers. We’d finally perfected resurrecting extinct species from their museum study skins. It was mesmerizing watching those winged wonders carpet the skies again. Everyone turned out, gazing upward, and mental health across the country skyrocketed.
What? No, we didn’t expect that. That’s social science territory. We were geneticists.
Eventually, we went big—North Atlantic blue whales the largest mammal in the world with tongues weighing as much as an entire elephant. Folks chartered boats to see groups of them, a short 30-minute boat ride off Cape Cod.
Yes, another Wild turkey, please.
The ranchers were easy. They fell in when the Endangered Species Act was overturned. Whenever the Red wolf’s numbers dipped, we just brought them back to life from bits of DNA found in the dead ones. Giddy conservationists shared videos on social media of polar bears cavorting across ice floes slaughtering baby seals just as they always had.
It was heady times. Everyone agreed: Science worked!
Not dinosaurs. We said we’d never do dinosaurs. That was too much.
Oh, it was the billionaires. I’m not trying to blame them. Truth is we couldn’t resist the money. Got carried away. Never should have brought back Smilodon fatalis and Arctodus simus. It was just one or two, at first, in private zoos. Then, the proprietary science got leaked—I know who did it. He’s living in a bunker in an island off California. Soon, we had Saber tooth tigers, extinct for thousands of years and tipping scales at a thousand pounds, ripping kids from limb to limb on playgrounds. And Giant short-faced bears, known as grizzly bears on stilts, crashing into McMansions, taking whatever meat they could find, whole chickens from freezers, babies from cribs, the family dog. Not a shred of fear in their DNA, the greed for their next meal grisly. It made the zombie apocalypse look mild.
I know. But we weren’t thinking. Honestly, I regret the moment Martha’s egg tooth atop her beak split a pinhole in her eggshell, the second she took her first breath of air.
