Woolly Mammoth to Be Cloned

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.

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.

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.

“They weren’t small....Elephas maximus!”

Well I’m far from dogmatic on the subject. I was relating something I heard recently, probably on one of John Batchelor’s broadcasts. IIRC his guest said that Hannibal had used an elephant native to North Africa’s mountains that is now extinct, but I have no idea what evidence he had to back up this claim.

This may be the “small elephant” of Hannibal; the North African Elephant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_Elephant

“The North African Elephant (Loxodonta africana pharaoensis) was a possible subspecies of the African Bush Elephant (Loxodonta africana), or possibly a separate elephant species, that existed in North Africa until becoming extinct in Ancient Roman times. These were the famous war elephants used by Carthage in the Punic Wars, their conflict with the Roman Republic. Although the subspecies has been formally described,[1][2] it has not been widely recognized by taxonomists. Other names for this animal include the North African Forest Elephant, Carthaginian Elephant, and Atlas Elephant. Originally, its natural range probably extended across North Africa and down to the present Sudanese and Eritrean coasts.”

“Carthaginian frescoes [3] and coins minted by whoever controlled North Africa at various times show very small (perhaps 2.5 metres or 8 feet 2 inches at the shoulder) elephants with the large ears and concave back typical of modern Loxodonta. The North African Elephant was smaller than the modern African Bush Elephant (L. a. africana), probably similar in size to the modern African Forest Elephant (L. cyclotis). It is also possible that it was more docile than the African Bush Elephant, which is generally untamable, allowing the Carthaginians to tame it by a method now lost to history. Modern scholarship has disputed whether or not Carthaginian elephants were furnished with turrets in combat; despite assertions to the contrary, the evidence indicates that African forest elephants could and did carry turrets in certain military contexts.[”

AHA! You left out the most important part of the sentence— “When I think of the money that is going to be spent on this impractical research, most of it probably coming from the taxpayers in one way or another”—a cheap rhetorical trick of excising one part of a sentence to change the overall thrust of my comment.

However, I forgive you. You think cloning of mammoths is entrepreneurship and innovation. I think it is a waste of resources. If you really think cloning is a good thing, then by all means let’s clone humans.

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