Sciences and Arts
Techno-Wizardry and the De-extinction of Celia the Ibex
On a cold and misty January 6, 2000, a fir tree in the Ordesa valley of the Spanish Pyrenees fell to the forest floor, crushing the last known individual of Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica—an ibex species that had been endemic the mountain range between Spain and France since the late Pleistocene.
As the last individual of her species, this ibex, Celia, was what we have come to call an endling. Her story joins that of other endlings, like Martha the passenger pigeon, Benjamin the thylacine (a carnivorous marsupial commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger), Turgi the Polynesian tree snail, and Lonesome George the Galápagos tortoise. Taken together, endlings form a grim and growing collection of extinction stories—a contemporary compendium of Aesop’s fables, warning us about ecological catastrophe. They are, inevitably, stories of how we humans carelessly spend nonhuman species.
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