But… only HUMANS matter!!! Not like we’re not all ultimately dependent on the larger ecosystem, after all!! /s
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If you go to an alien planet and say things like “they’re harmless,” bad things are likely to happen. If you travel through time to “just fix” the timeline, bad things are likely to happen. If you send out a signal to aliens giving them a map to Earth, bad things are likely to happen. And if you clone extinct animals, very very bad things are likely to happen.
Yes, of course, obviously. The real questions (if you’re in a position to decide to do this or not) are whether good things are also likely to happen, to whom, and at what scale. Which effects dominate the outcome? Who should actually be allowed to grant or withhold permission, and under what circumstances?
Nature is healing!
Maybe they are fans if Jasper Fforde and his Tuesday Next series? The cloners, not the mammoths.
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I’ve seen five movies that say otherwise!
(Jurassic Park 3 was rubbish - worse than the locusts because of the thing with the T Rex)
I mean… those were all about how doing that is a bad idea… People got eaten by dinosaurs… Those are disaster films…
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Pff. Next you’re going to tell me Don’t Create the Torment Nexus wasn’t meant to be an instruction manual.
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Yeah but dinosaurs 
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I think people like this go for big and flashy creatures just to get funding. I don’t think many serious biologists think it would actually work. Mostly because even if the creature was born alive it probably won’t thrive because it won’t have the correct microbiome that would support it, and likely would not have an immune system that could work with modern bacteria and viruses.
We have enough trouble keeping alive the critters we have now, and funding would be better spend doing that.
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The point is that some of those dinosaurs will kill you… But sure, it’s fun to watch them on the screen…
Also, they were highly inaccurate! Ask any random 3rd grader today, and they’ll tell you what the dinosaurs REALLY looked like!
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That’s the side of EZ-DNA R&D that seems more likely to go poorly.
Historical megafauna mostly don’t have viable habitats; much less a viable habitat they can probably outcompete the present occupants of; and, worst case, if you are big enough to be ‘megafauna’ you are pretty much relying on reasonably stringent enforcement of conservation laws to not get shot.
Whether dormant long enough that we’ve forgotten about it immunologically or with artificially reshuffled antigen signatures, pathogens are much more likely to be a problem.
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This is probably the biggest issue I have with this project (and with a lot of “Arkship” type speculative fiction.) We are very early days in our understanding of how the environment, meaning the internal and external microbiome and all the associated hangers-on, function to keep us alive. Hell, we just discovered what may be an entire new branch of life in “obelisks” that seem to be at least commensal with us. We have no clue how to reproduce this. And in order to get this project to fruition, you would need to maintain incredible levels of sterility. And then you need to recreate the entire microbiological life support system with no clue at all of what it actually was composed of. Would an elephant’s microbiome suffice? Who knows? Tens of thousands of years of evolution and an entirely different habitat, I am gonna guess that would be a big, fat no. But what the hell do I know? Maybe they pull it off, but if so, I do feel bad for the beasts they create. I suspect they would need to generate several generations of misery in order for them to finally get it right, more or less.
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Working to help preserve near-extinct species would be so much better. Clone from older DNA of animals that have such small populations they desperately need more genetic diversity. Those animals have extant individuals to provide the microbes those types of animals need to survive and, for animals like mammals, raise and teach the new ones. As well as individuals to carry fetuses or develop eggs from the DNA.
Or just use the money for animals in the wild who need help. That kind of money could pay for a lot of re-wilding and migration corridors!
But of course not. It has to be big, flashy, Mammoth or dodo birds. For human consumption either literally as hunting or metaphorically as entertainment. 
Also, thanks. This sounds fascinating.
Edit: dear auto-incorrect, how did a mistyped “animals l” become “snails?!”
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Snails are a lot more representative of animals in general than the kinds of things we’re talking about here. Of course, then it would be better to auto-correct to “insects”.
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Though in truth, I think resurrecting some extinct snail might actually do more damage to the environment than a wooly mammoth.
We should totally have some cell-cultured dodo meat though. They were supposed to be very tasty
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As far as environmental damage goes, though…the ice ages were only a few millennia ago, and there is a real sense where our natural world is already damaged by the loss of these megafauna. For instance there are still a lot of plant species that are adapted to distributors that no longer exist, or depend on introduced cattle and horses instead. Some have then proposed “Pleistocene rewilding”, doing our best to introduce analogs for the species we’ve wiped out to restore environments to their more complete state. I can’t say it’s a good idea but it’s definitely an idea.
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I vaguely recall a sci-fi story from years ago that centered on cultured meat, in which the final line was something like “…and now we need to discuss another archaic word. Cannibalism.” That was a “hmmmm…” kind of moment for me.
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You’re right.
Colossal isn’t interested in ecology. None of their core researchers work with whole animals, let alone with populations or environments. They’re in vitro molecular biologists, geneticists, and computational modelers. I doubt anyone in the company has ever intended to do more with the mammoth than breed a couple genetically modified elephants that they can claim are de-extincted mammoths
Of course working on key species that are still extant but critically endangered would do more good, but that’s not their goal. This is a company bringing in millions of dollars with stories of mammoths, tasmanian tigers, and dodo birds. The plus side is real research is being advanced, and other scientists can then apply what comes from their work to to do some good.
Tangentially related, just this week I was discussing plans to sequence genes form rocky mountain locusts samples trapped in glaciers so we can work on why there have been no swarms in over a century. A geneticist collaborating on that developed their methods for extracting DNA from long frozen samples in part with funding from Colossal
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