what extinct animals are coming back

A few extinct animals are being talked about as “coming back,” but most of what’s happening is still experimental and controversial, not a true return to the wild. The main names in the news are the woolly mammoth, dodo, thylacine, passenger pigeon, and a few others tied to de-extinction projects or “lookalike” breeding efforts.

What’s being worked on

• Woolly mammoth: Scientists are trying to create mammoth-like traits in elephants rather than cloning a pure mammoth, and one company has publicly talked about producing an embryo by 2028.

• Dodo: A company has said it wants to use gene-editing with the Nicobar pigeon, but experts say this is a far harder bird project than many headlines suggest.

• Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine: It’s one of the best-known de-extinction targets because researchers have worked on its genome and have a close living relative that could help in lab work.

• Passenger pigeon: This one is being pursued through edited descendants, not literal revival, with the goal of creating a bird that resembles the original.

• Aurochs and quagga: These are often described as “coming back,” but they’re really being recreated through selective breeding of living relatives, so they’re more like proxies than exact copies.

What’s actually realistic

The short version is that “coming back” can mean different things : cloning, gene-editing, or selective breeding can each produce something that looks or behaves somewhat like the extinct animal, but that doesn’t always mean the original species is truly restored. Scientists and critics also warn that even if a project produces an animal, reintroducing it into a real ecosystem is a much bigger challenge than making the first embryo or hatchling.

Why people are excited

These projects get attention because they sound like science fiction and because they raise real conservation questions. Supporters argue they could help restore lost ecological roles or advance genetic tools, while critics say they can distract from protecting species that are still alive today.

Bottom line

If you’re asking which extinct animals are most “likely” to come back in some form, the biggest names are mammoth, dodo, thylacine, passenger pigeon, aurochs, and quagga. But the honest answer is that most of these would be engineered stand-ins , not exact resurrections.