CAT scans and DNA sequencing are opening up so many new avenues in archaeology it will take decades to describe and catalog the data. Amazing stuff...
Isn’t there an active effort underway right now to clone a baby mammonth?? (I don’t feel like wading through Google at the moment, and Freepers know just about all...) As I recall, it was going to take something like five or six generations of very careful breeding, and using African elephants as foster mothers, but because so much intact mammoth DNA has been recovered and sequenced, the project is possible. There have been a number of intact or nearly intact and solidly frozen mammoths collected in just the last couple of decades that the DNA research is quite advanced...
There is. A short article is here: http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/17/scientists-trying-to-clone-resurrect-extinct-mammoth/?hpt=T2
I got this link from the wikipedia entry for ‘woolly mammoth’, which also has some interesting references on there being still surviving herds in the Siberian wilderness (at least to the early 1900’s). Caveat lector... but interesting.
An extinct animal or subspecies has already been brought back this way, some animal from the Pyrenees. I’m still looking for the link - it died shortly after birth though.
Found it: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/4409958/Extinct-ibex-is-resurrected-by-cloning.html
We dug up one in a peat bog in northern IN many years ago. Still had some pliable meat on the bone.