Hendrik Poinar had no idea the bizarre turn his day was about to take.
Perched on a leather sofa in a downtown Toronto office, his host, a wealthy businessman, uncorked a $7,000 bottle of wine and outlined the multimillion-dollar offer: leave behind his research position at McMaster University’s Ancient DNA Centre in Ontario and work full time to bring the extinct woolly mammoth back to life.
The businessman went on to describe a grand vision — a “Pleistocene Park” housed on 150 acres north of Toronto, where visitors would pay to see the herbivorous beasts. Throughout the three-hour lunch, he peppered Poinar with questions about the risks and feasibility of such an endeavor, trying to feel out how much skin Poinar was willing to put in the game.
Poinar was stunned. On this spring day in 2006, he was flying high on the heels of his recent study published in the journal Science. He and his colleagues had reconstructed the partial genome of a woolly mammoth found frozen in Siberia, and he was convinced that researchers like himself would soon be able to take bits of degraded tissue samples, extract ancient DNA and use them to piece together whole genomes of extinct animals. Poinar was thrilled that he was finally on the verge of uncovering genomic clues to past extinctions. But an ice age wildlife park wasn’t quite what he had in mind.
Hendrik Poinar and his father, George Poinar Jr., an insect pathologist with a penchant for amber, have spent their careers exploring portals to the prehistoric past — tracing species’ appearances, movements, adaptations and extinctions.
