From an Australian frog that swallowed its own eggs to woolly mammoths, scientists are getting ever closer to being able to bring long-lost species back from the dead.

Millions of years ago thylacines, also known as Tasmanian tigers, were widespread across Australia. About the size of an American coyote, these dog-like creatures with stripes disappeared from the mainland around 2,000 years ago. They remained in Tasmania until the 1920s, when they were slaughtered by European colonisers who saw them as a threat to livestock.

“It was a human-driven extinction – European settlers came to Australia and brutally obliterated this animal,” says Andrew Pask, a geneticist at the University of Melbourne.

Pask is leading a team of scientists who, together with “de-extinction” company Colossal Biosciences, aim to recreate the wolf-like creature and bring it back.

Thanks to recent advances in genetics, namely the advent of gene editing technology Crispr-Cas9, the thylacine is not the only lost species that we could soon see again. How does the science of de-extinction work, and what kinds of ethical questions does it raise?

[Didn’t any of these people see the movies? Let’s NOT, hello. ~ Beege]