Can humans resurrect the thylacine?
This article is part of a series of Q&A on the Tasmanian Tiger originally answered on Quora.
Not at present.
There was an Australian project publicised in the early 2000s, to attempt resurrecting the thylacine. Critics said it would be impossible. Proponents reported greater success than generally expected but still fell a long way short of cloning the Tasmanian tiger.
The thylacine cloning project was essentially shelved, but efforts were subsequently directed toward attempting to clone a species of gastric-brooding frog. Australia had two such species, now both extinct, whereby the parent frog swallows the eggs. These hatch, and tadpoles develop, in the stomach of the adult. When ready, the parent regurgitates the young frogs. This project was to act as a bit of a stepping-stone to learn more about the cloning project, and it actually met with success! Embryos were created and brought to life, resurrecting the species. All the same, they did not live long, and certainly not to maturity, but it is important to remember that this project is serving as part of the learning curve for a possible thylacine resurrection.
Separately, in the USA, scientists managed to incorporate thylacine genetic material into mouse embryos. In effect, part of the thylacine DNA programming had been resurrected and was now producing proteins in a living organism. One might argue that the "thylacine" component in this mouse-tiger "hybrid" is infinitessimally small - 0.000001% of the full DNA sequence or something (I just picked a random number), so I'll leave it to you to decide whether that's a thylacine (hybrid) resurrected or not!
In my opinion though, all things being the same (ie notwithstanding some major catastrophic societal collapse), I would expect the technology will eventually get there that allows us to prepare a fresh organism, from scratch, using DNA sequences we've derived from the thylacine. What this means for identity of a species, consciousness and entity is up to the philosophers and spiritual people to debate, but I think one day we'll see a human-induced thylacine-like animal walking again.