It's been done before.
Posted on 12/06/2011 12:40:09 PM PST by Fractal Trader
Within five years, a woolly mammoth will likely be cloned, according to scientists who have just recovered well-preserved bone marrow in a mammoth thigh bone. Japan's Kyodo News first reported the find. You can see photos of the thigh bone at this Kyodo page.
Russian scientist Semyon Grigoriev, acting director of the Sakha Republic's mammoth museum, and colleagues are now analyzing the marrow, which they extracted from the mammoth's femur, found in Siberian permafrost soil.
Grigoriev and his team, along with colleagues from Japan's Kinki University, have announced that they will launch a joint research project next year aimed at re-creating the enormous mammal, which went extinct around 10,000 years ago. fossilhunter
Mammoths used to be a common sight on the landscape of North America and Eurasia. One of my favorite papers of recent months concerned the earliest-known depiction of an animal from the Americas. It was a mammoth engraved on a mammoth bone. Many of our distant ancestors probably had regular face-to-face encounters with the elephant-like giants.
The key to cloning the woolly mammoth is to replace the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant with those extracted from the mammoth's bone marrow cells. Doing this, according to the researchers, can result in embryos with mammoth DNA. That's actually been known for a while.
NEWS: Prehistoric Dog Found With Mammoth Bone in Mouth
What's been missing is woolly mammoth nuclei with undamaged genes. Scientists have been on a Holy Grail-type search for such pristine nuclei since the late 1990s. Now it sounds like the missing genes may have been found.
In an odd twist, global warming may be responsible for the breakthrough.
Warmer temperatures tied to global warming have thawed ground in eastern Russia that is almost always permanently frozen. As a result, researchers have found a fair number of well-preserved frozen mammoths there, including the one that yielded the bone marrow.
GGG Global Warming two-fer!
Pliocene Park?
If I remember from the movies, this never ends well.
Don’t worry, they’re all female...
Besides, who would oppose a good ol’ “Mammoth Steak” anyway.
What would you call the restaurant? BC?
Why? Who needs another gigantic, purposeless animal to feed and clean up its poop?
It's been done before.
Now I want more than ever to schedule that western hunt...
To be cloned later:
1) T Rex (but not Marc Bolan)
2) Che
3) Mohammad
4) A Nazi general who rode a tank when the fighting stank
5) Mao
6) Judas Iscariot
7) Vlad Lenin
8) Uncle Joe Stalin
9) Joseph Goebbels
10) Jim Jones
The reality of this sounds more plausible than DNA from amber trapped mosquitoes.
But “Pleistocene Park” just doesn’t have a ring to it...
See my post on “Mammoth Steaks”...
Meanwhile zoologists all seem to agree that there is no place on the planet where it could actually survive.
Asinine is not too strong a word.
“Oooh! Ahhh! That’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming.” - Ian Malcolm
[ Meanwhile zoologists all seem to agree that there is no place on the planet where it could actually survive. ]
Polar Bears survive in zoos, Elephants live in zoos too, why not a Zoo?
Or send them to South pole and teach them to eat penguins....
lol! You must be old if you know who Marc Bolan was.
Great band, btw. Shame he died so young.
I’ve got no problem with zoos adding mammoths to the menagerie-they lived in colder climates, so they could be an attraction at zoos in northern states instead of elephants that need heat, expensive food and housing and all that in a cold climate-they’d be less trouble to keep than elephants and a hell of a lot more interesting...
Does BC stand for “Before Cuisine”?
Hey, been there... 
done that many times!
Whoa, Bend? You cloned... 
a woolly mammoth?
Yeah, I've been... 
with many a woolly momma--
That's woolly... 
mammoth, not momma.
Gadzooks! Have I been caught... 
with my foot in it again!
Hey, that wasn't a foot you used, Bendy... 
but it almost was?
Saved by my last... 
woolly momma--
To what purpose? The animal is extinct because it’s environmental niche no longer exists. How much energy will the UN waste in attempting to re-create that niche once there is a small herd of wolly mammouths living in a zoo somewhere?
This will not end well for energy companies prospecting in the arctic, for instance.
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