In a 2012 Playboy Interview, Richard Dawkins addressed whether a fuller understanding of genetics would allow us to create something akin to extinct life forms, even prehistoric ones. The passage:

Playboy:

Do we know which came first—bigger brains or bipedalism?

Richard Dawkins:

Bipedalism came first.

Playboy:

How do we know that?

Richard Dawkins:

Fossils. That’s one place the fossils are extremely clear. Three million years ago Australopithecus afarensis were bipedal, but their brains were no bigger than a chimpanzee’s. The best example we have is Lucy [a partial skeleton found in 1974 in Ethiopia]. In a way, she was an upright-walking chimpanzee.

Playboy:

You like Lucy.

Richard Dawkins:

Yes. [smiles]

Playboy:

You’ve said you expect mankind will have a genetic book of the dead by 2050. How would that be helpful?

Richard Dawkins:

Because we contain within us the genes that have survived through generations, you could theoretically read off a creature’s evolutionary history. “Ah, yes, this animal lived in the sea. This is the time when it lived in deserts. This bit shows it must have lived up mountains. And this shows it used to burrow.”

Playboy:

Could that help us bring back a dinosaur? You have suggested crossing a bird and a crocodile and maybe putting it in an ostrich egg.

Richard Dawkins:

It would have to be more sophisticated than a cross. It’d have to be a merging.

Playboy:

Could we recreate Lucy?

Richard Dawkins:

We already know the human genome and the chimpanzee genome, so you could make a sophisticated guess as to what the genome of the common ancestor might have been like. From that you might be able to grow an animal that was close to the common ancestor. And from that you might split the difference between that ancestral animal you re-created and a modern human and get Lucy.•