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Rats, cats and wild pigs (which admittedly got here via human transportation)

exactly my point. It also appears dingo ancestors arrived by boat 3-4 thousand years ago with seafaring humans.

Whether deliberate, through gross negligence or simply out of ignorance, humans have brought the extinction of various species whether directly or indirectly. Whether out of malice or simply out of cause an effect for an unrelated pursuit.

I'm not trying to simply denounce humans as "virii", but to show an interesting dichotomy - Humans have both the capability (or soon to be) to revive a species that was once extinct, and the ability to make many species extinct.

I am an Australian.

When I was a lad living in Townsville (North Queensland) , a popular sport amongst kids was to go Toad hunting, a competitive activity involving torch and a pitchfork. You would fill a sack in a few hours. (Can't remember what we did with the bodies). That was 35 years ago. The problem is much worse now.

With maturity and reflection I regretted that activity - too inhumane. Now I'm not so sure.

Here are some facts, some well known, some not:

- imported from Hawaii in 1935, quickly adapted/evolved.
- size: up to 24cm , weight 1.4 kg
- extreme adaptability, desert to mangrove
- lay up to 35,000 eggs at a time
- tadpole have 5 rows of teeth used to rasp (like a shark)
- eat anything they can swallow, including small mammals
- extremely poisonous - dogs that bite them often die
- sometimes boiled to extract the poison, which is also a hallucinogenic drug.
(Users also often die)

Ref: http://www.austmus.gov.au/factsheets/canetoad.htm

Well, the article doesn't say much about what the army is supposed to do except kill them. I highly doubt that's the strategy and, after being raised on farms in my youth, it's easier to use a trap or target the nests than to get down on your hands and knees and kill each and every one of them. In fact, even if you killed all the visible ones, how do you kill/remove all the tadpoles and eggs from the ponds and water in Australia? It would be obviously stupid to try to introduce another foreign species that might rampage about the land. Especially one that would be immune to the toad's toxin.

It's odd that they deploy the military considering that current government research has been directed towards isolating a sex pheremone to disrupt the breeding cycle. The government fact sheet suggests removing the jelly strings of eggs from water & humane execution of adult cane toads. There are guides on Cane Toad control that talk about using traps but what do you do with the toads after you trap them. Will the Australian military be trudging through wetlands and collecting toad eggs while smashing the adults with specialized mallets? No one is alluding to the method of the military.

Perhaps this is some left over funding that was appropriated to the military and now they feel like they have to spend it? Either way, I don't live in North Eastern Australia so I don't know what level of effect these toads are truly having.

Here's a humorous Google Video on the cane toad. It's more just a dabble in CGI by film makers but I thought it worth mentioning given the topic.

WhoooEeee.
Yes m'am.
He ate nothin larger than an egg.
Well O'll Be Durned.
J'es Paint Me Pink And Call Me Suzy.

Maybe that sounded like a discerning diet to the likes of most readers, but considering the size of some eggs that's not saying particularly much.

The largest bird egg is from the Ostrich Sturthio camelus. The egg measures 15 - 20 cm long, 10 - 15 cm in diameter and weighs 1 - 1.78 kg.

Judging from those specifications he obviously didn't slaughter and consume an entire COW at one sitting. But I'm still thinking that 1.78 kilograms (that's 3.92-and-change pounds for the metrically challenged) gives him a lot of gastronomic leeway. I suggest that perhaps you might want to qualify that statement.

Ah, I got the impression from the article that there was only one preserved pup... but last year's article has more details and does say that they have DNA from three individuals.

The Editor said:

/. needs more dinosaur articles...

The skeleton they found isn't technically a dinosaur. My background is Physics, not Biology, but it has something to do with which Order or Class these creatures fit into.

I only found this out when my daughter was studying dinosaurs in school. I told her that there were dinosaurs that lived in the oceans and she told me they weren't really dinosaurs! I google'd it and sure enough, she was right. Doh!

They had a HUGE explosion of these things. This movie showed them in hoards. It also had this one scene with this hippie - the guy had a VW van and his hobby was to go around smashing these things. He would swerve the van from one side of the street to the other, running over the toads which would make a very satisfying pop. This hippie is the only thing I remember from high school biology.

So, my point is that these toads were introduced for an ecological reason (pest control), but apparently these guys didn't understand ecology all that well. Of course, this Hawaii thing is different since the frogs weren't introduced intentionally, but it seems toads/frogs have a talent for growing explosively.

... don't try this with Cane Toads.

I remember reading about this over a year ago when somebody realized that it should be possible and began snapping up all the tiger fetuses in jars he could find.

Two points:
- This story is at least a year old, I think it was originally in either New Scientist, or the Times of London.

- It is NOT a tiger, it is a striped, dog-like marsupial, that happens to have stripes. The reason it was called a tiger simply relates to it being striped and carnivorous, not a cat or carnivore at all.

More info is available from the Australian National Museum here, or from Sheffield Univerisity here.

Vote!

Actually, I don't really see why it would be such a terrible problem to birth a Thylacine. Once an embryo is created, it could be implanted into a large dog, say a St. Bernard.

The only issue that I could think of at this moment (and this is no small issue) is that the Thylacine was a marsupial. This means that they would be born early and complete gestation inside an external pouch on the mother. (Ever seen a kangaroo immediately after birth?? They look like uncooked embryos.) How another animal could simulate this is beyond me. Perhaps they could birth it in the Kangaroo..

Also, there is the question of how much behavior is inate and how much is learned. We know, from other species like the Pandas, that it is very difficult for them to learn what to do (such as mate) from instinct. The pandas that were residing in California until they died recently, had many, many issues with mating. The male actually couldn't figure out where to put it in! After the female successfully gave birth (actually, this happened quite a few times) she didn't know how to care for the child, and ultimately she would sit on it and kill it.

I think that at one point in time, I had a point.
Eh.

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Cloning of extinct species seems like potentially a really dangerous idea. The reason most things go extinct is because their ecological niche is complete destroyed. This also means that their predators have gone away or adapted to eat something else. The cane toads in Australia are the classic example of putting a species into an ecosystem that really is not expected them. What a disaster that has been.