It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange Champs. Today, extinction.

When my kids were little, it seemed like every picture book we read was full of animals.

Night after night we'd read stories about cuddly polar bears and naughty monkeys and whole oceans full of fish.

And then I'd tuck them into bed with their favorite stuffed tigers and pandas.

It's almost like there's a secret curriculum to childhood

to learn the Earth's creatures and fall in love with them.

And maybe that's one reason it hurts so much

to see so many of those creatures going extinct.

The bad news is that Earth is facing a mass extinction crisis.

By the end of the century, we could lose up to half of all living species.

But the good news is there are people trying to do something about it,

including trying to bring lost

species like passenger pigeons and even woolly mammoths back to life.

Here's my prediction. Within the next couple of years, people working on this mammothy

extinction project will succeed in transferring one, maybe two genes into an elephant cell

that's growing on a dish in a lab.

And they will be rightfully proud of this achievement. It will be a fantastic advance of this technology.

Beth Shapiro is a de-extinction biologist. And incredible as it sounds, she really is working on bringing

the woolly mammoth back to life.

In her lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she's isolating ancient mammoth DNA.

But before you start thinking Jurassic Park, it's not exactly like that.

Because the idea isn't really to clone a mammoth.

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