We dream of living forever. We hope that we will be able to clone a beloved pet, as happened with Dolly the sheep. We want to walk through the “Jurassic Park”, look at dinosaurs and mammoths, see extinct moas, dodos, and other creatures. Beth Shapiro, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Santa Cruz in California, tells us the fascinating history of the modern science of species reconstruction. As soon as any organism dies, its DNA immediately begins to break down under the influence of ultraviolet light and bacteria, so you can’t just take a cell and clone an extinct animal. Researchers are faced with a difficult task - they are trying to put together a puzzle in which some of the pieces of DNA have been lost. Let's figure out whether we need to revive extinct species (Beth Shapiro is sure that we should), what difficulties await us along this path and what this may lead to.