de-extinction, also called resurrection biology, the process of resurrecting species that have died out, or gone extinct. Although once considered a fanciful notion, the possibility of bringing extinct species back to life has been raised by advances in selective breeding, genetics, and reproductive cloning technologies. Key among those advances was the development in the 1990s of a technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), which was used to produce the first mammalian clone, Dolly the sheep (born 1996, died 2003). In 2009, using SCNT, scientists very nearly achieved de-extinction for the first time, attempting to bring back the extinct