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.
... made necessary by the fact that neither of Michelle’s daughters look like her.
ROFLOL
Why? Just cuz they can? Sounds like a waste of a lot of grant money - but I repeat myself...
It’ll give PETA something to do.
Counting down until some wag posts a picture of Moochell!
Dont use frog dna.
I know it’s wrong to do this, but I want to see a living one SOO bad!!
And remember the t-rex cells they found? Will that come next?
Balderdash.
|
|
GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
Thanks Fractal Trader. |
|
|
No, teach them to eat kudzu...
... and stinkbugs.
“ho-hum”
Why am I not surprised at this?
On the other hand, life is full of surprises!
“ho-hum”
Why am I not surprised at this?
On the other hand, life is full of surprises!
The glass is actually half full
Mammoth veal could solve world hunger
Ted Turner resturants to begin serving Mammoth Steaks.
“The herd has reached mammoth sizes”, says Ted.
“and stinkbugs.”
Finding a dead one every day. I live between Cleveland and Akron. Don’t know what to do about them.
“Meanwhile zoologists all seem to agree that there is no place on the planet where it could actually survive.”
Source please, this animal was very adaptable surviving great fluctuations in temperature over time. Even the elephant was used to cross the Alps by Hannibal.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.