The persian Leopard is dying.

http://www.persianleopard.com/

This is the biggest of all the leopards in the world.

It lives in Armenia, the midle east and central asia.

This creature is belived by some to die out in less that 10 years!

 

It would take a veritable miracle to keep these from extinction. What a wonderful animal that, once its gone, can never be recreated.

 

not true; with technology and cloning, maybe someday.

 

Ok, then where's my Wooly Mammoth? Where's my Giant Ground Sloth? Heck, where's my Tasmanian Tiger? Where are all the thousands of species that have 'recently' gone extinct that perhaps could be cloned? Cloning a new animal is an expensive business. We don't have the resources available to go about cloning extinct species.

And even if we did clone an individual, then what? We certainly can't recreate a species from a cloned individual. In fact, even to recreate a single viable population of any species would require the cloning of at least many dozen and preferably many hundred individuals. Even once we have a viable population, the genetic diversity of that population will be very poor compared to the original species, strongly favoring extinction (again) if we do reintroduce the species to the wild.

Unfortunately, once a species is gone, it is gone, for all practical purposes and for most impractical ones.

Chris