A display at the Australian Museum's When Mammoths Roamed
exhibition in 2009.  A display at the Australian Museum's When
Mammoths Roamed exhibition in 2009. Photo: Danielle Smith
Woolly mammoths stomp through the Siberian tundra as the giant
moa strides the forest floor of New Zealand and Tasmania's dog-
like ''tigers'' stalk their prey under the cover of night.  This
is not a snapshot of times past, nor an addition to Steven
Spielberg's Jurassic Park movies.   A museum display of the
Giant Moa.  A museum display of the Giant Moa.     A drawing of
the extinct Dodo bird.  A drawing of the extinct Dodo bird.
Farther down the road, other species could live again through
artificially reconstituted sequences of their DNA, goes the
argument.  ''For the gastric frog it would take maybe a year or
two years. For a mammoth maybe 20, 30 years, maybe sooner,''
evolutionary geneticist Hendrik Poinar of Canada's McMaster
University says of ongoing ''de-extinction'' efforts.    Just
last month, a team at Australia's Univer