But it is not just curiosity that drives the imperative to introduce extinct, novel or threatened species. We now have the power not only to obliterate life from the planet, but also to protect and manage it.
We should decide what kind of life there should be. We should invest in technologies that allow us to maintain biological diversity and perhaps even increase it.
Some might even argue that humans have a particular moral obligation to re-introduce species whose extinction they caused, either directly, as is likely in the case of the mammoth, or indirectly, as a result of global climatic disruption.