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The idea would make headlines around the world and bring tears of joy to the planet's journalists. An adorable baby woolly mammoth, tottering on its newborn legs, is introduced to the media. Cloned from a few cells scraped from the permafrost of Siberia, the little creature provides the latest proof of the might of modern science and demonstrates the fact that extinction has at long last lost its sting. It is a fascinating prospect, one that was raised again last week when the most recently discovered carcass of a mammoth was revealed to the public in Yokohama, Japan. The female,...

Contrary to their hunting reputation, Stone Age Siberians killed mammoths only every few years when they needed tusks for toolmaking, a new study finds. People living between roughly 33,500 and 31,500 years ago hunted the animals mainly for ivory, say paleontologist Pavel Nikolskiy and archaeologist Vladimir Pitulko of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Hunting could not have driven mammoths to extinction, the researchers report June 5 in the Journal of Archaeological Science. On frigid tundra with few trees, mammoth tusks substituted for wood as a raw material for tools, they propose. Siberian people ate mammoth meat after hunts, but food...

New re­search sug­gests wooly mam­moths, the gi­gantic cousins of mod­ern ele­phants, al­so died out as a re­sult of cli­mate change fol­low­ing a cos­mic im­pact—and that blast may have shocked hu­man popula­t­ions as well. Ei­ther a com­et scrap­ing the at­mos­phere or a me­te­or­ite slam­ming in­to the Earth caused glob­al-scale com­bus­tion, scorch­ing the air, melt­ing bed­rock and al­tered the course of Earth’s his­to­ry, ac­cord­ing to re­searcher Ken­neth Tanker­s­ley of the Uni­vers­ity of Cin­cin­nati. Tanker­s­ley said while the cos­mic strike had an im­me­di­ate and deadly ef­fect, the long-term side ef­fects were far more dev­as­tat­ing – si­m­i­lar to Kra­ka­to­a’s af­termath but many times worse...

Russian scientists claimed Wednesday they have discovered blood in the carcass of a woolly mammoth, adding that the rare find could boost their chances of cloning the prehistoric animal. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-05-russian-scientists-rare-blood-mammoth.html

Biologists briefly brought the extinct Pyrenean ibex back to life in 2003 by creating a clone from a frozen tissue sample harvested before the goat's entire population vanished in 2000. The clone survived just seven minutes after birth, but it gave scientists hope that "de-extinction," once a pipedream, could become a reality. Ten years later, a group of researchers and conservationists gathered in Washington, D.C., today (March 15) for a forum called TEDxDeExtinction, hosted by the National Geographic Society, to talk about how to revive extinct animals, from the Tasmanian tiger and the saber-toothed tiger to the woolly mammoth and...

Alcohol can lower an elephant's core body temperature Two elephants have been saved from the deadly Siberian cold by drinking vodka, Russian officials say. They say the animals had to be taken out into the bitter cold after the wooden trailer they were travelling in caught fire in the Novosibirsk region. The elephants, aged 45 and 48, suffered frostbite to the tips of their ears amid temperatures of -40C (-40F) But they were warmed up by two cases of vodka mixed with warm water, one official was quoted as saying. "They started roaring like if they were in the jungle!...

An 11-year-old Russian boy stumbled across the 30,000-year-old remains of a woolly mammoth, an experience that was surely either incredibly exciting or permanently traumatising. According to the Moscow News, Yevgeny Salinder found the 500-kilogram beast in the tundra of the Taymyr peninsula in northern Russia. Scientists laboured for a week with axes and steam to dig it out of the permafrost it's been encased in for centuries. Woolly mammoths have been found in the permafrost in Siberia since at least 1929, but this is one of the best preserved. Its tusks, mouth and rib cage are clearly visible....

Well-preserved frozen woolly mammoth fragments have been discovered deep in Siberia that may contain living cells, edging a tad closer to the possibility of cloning a prehistoric animal, the mission's organiser has said. Russia's North-Eastern Federal University said an international team of researchers had discovered mammoth hair, soft tissues and bone marrow some 328 feet (100 meters) underground during a summer expedition in the northeastern province of Yakutia. Expedition chief Semyon Grigoryev said Korean scientists with the team had set a goal of finding living cells in the hope of cloning a mammoth. Scientists have previously found bones and fragments...

Although human hunting played a part in the demise of the woolly mammoth about 10,000 years ago, homo sapiens were but bit players in a global drama involving climate change, comet impact and a multitude of other factors, scientists have found in separate studies. Previous research had blamed their demise on tribal hunting. But new findings “pretty much dispel the idea of any one factor, any one event, as dooming the mammoths,” said Glen MacDonald, a researcher and geographer at the University of California in Los Angeles, to LiveScience.com. In other words, hunting didn’t help, but it was not instrumental....

An exceedingly well preserved juvenile mammoth carcass has been found in Siberia near the Arctic Ocean and it shows signs of having been attacked by a cave lion and then partially butchered by humans. Dubbed Yuka by the Mammuthus organization, which is studying the remains, the six foot long creature was believed to have been a year and a half to perhaps three or four years old at the time of its death. The mammoth was found by tusk hunters in Northern Siberia, who then turned it over to scientists with the Mammuthus organization. The BBC and Discovery have been...

A ginger-haired mammoth baby found in Siberia could have been snatched by hungry human hunters from the jaws of a lion 10,000 years ago. The body of the beast - the first ever found with its distinctive 'strawberry blonde' hair - has been described as being of 'huge' significance. It's could be evidence that ancient humans attacked and fed on mammoths in Siberia, with the body of 'Yuka' showing wounds consistent with an attack by lions AND people.

Scientists in search of ancient tusks made a startling discovery. They uncovered the nearly perfectly preserved remains of a woolly mammoth in northern Siberia. The juvenile mammoth is believed to be more than 10,000 years old, but was only 3 to 4 years old when it died. It is unlike any other mammoth that has been unearthed before. The scientists reveal their discovery, which they named "Yuka," in a BBC documentary. Yuka has strawberry blond hair, unlike the dark hair that other mammoths have been found to have. Plus, Yuka's footpads are incredibly well preserved, but some of his bones...

Scientists, it's said, behave more like lawyers than philosophers. They do not so much test their theories as prosecute their cases, seeking supportive evidence and ignoring data that do not fit—a failing known as confirmation bias. They then accuse their opponents of doing the same thing. This is what makes debates over nature and nurture, dietary fat and climate change so polarized. But just because the prosecutor is biased in favor of his case does not mean the defendant is innocent. Sometimes biased advocates are right. An example of this phenomenon is now being played out in geology over the...

A juvenile mammoth, nicknamed "Yuka," was found entombed in Siberian ice near the shores of the Arctic Ocean and shows signs of being cut open by ancient people. The remarkably well preserved frozen carcass was discovered in Siberia as part of a BBC/Discovery Channel-funded expedition and is believed to be at least 10,000 years old, if not older. If further study confirms the preliminary findings, it would be the first mammoth carcass revealing signs of human interaction in the region. The carcass is in such good shape that much of its flesh is still intact, retaining its pink color. The...

We report the discovery in Lake Cuitzeo in central Mexico of a black, carbon-rich, lacustrine layer, containing nanodiamonds, microspherules, and other unusual materials that date to the early Younger Dryas and are interpreted to result from an extraterrestrial impact. These proxies were found in a 27-m-long core as part of an interdisciplinary effort to extract a paleoclimate record back through the previous interglacial. Our attention focused early on an anomalous, 10-cm-thick, carbon-rich layer at a depth of 2.8 m that dates to 12.9 ka and coincides with a suite of anomalous coeval environmental and biotic changes independently recognized in other...

Gene reveals mammoth coat colour By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC News Woolly mammoths had both dark and light coats The coat colour of mammoths that roamed the Earth thousands of years ago has been determined by scientists. Some of the curly tusked animals would have sported dark brown coats, while others had pale ginger or blond hair. The information was extracted from a 43,000-year-old woolly mammoth bone from Siberia using the latest genetic techniques. Writing in the journal Science, the researchers said a gene called Mc1r was controlling the beasts' coat colours. This gene is responsible for hair-colour in...

(snip) Most scholars now agree that hunters—more than climate change or a mystery epidemic—are what doomed the mammoths. Whatever the cause, by 11,000 years ago the king of the Pleistocene was a goner. (snip) If a group of devotees has its way, this shaggy ice-age mascot—and a host of other bygone megafauna besides—may yet walk again. (snip) The scientists, in other words, had managed to assemble half the woolly-mammoth genome; they claimed that in three years they could finish the job. That would put scientists within striking distance of an even greater feat: repopulating the earth with creatures that vanished...

(Filed: 20/12/2005) The first serious possibility that the woolly mammoth, or something like it, could walk on Earth again was raised yesterday by an international team of scientists. Woolly mammoths died out approximately 10,000 years ago A portion of the genetic code of the mammoth has been reconstructed and, to the surprise of scientists, the team that carried out the feat believes that it will be possible to decode the entire genetic make-up. The tusked beast stood 12-feet tall, weighed up to seven tons and had a shaggy dark brown coat that hung from its belly. DNA was extracted from...

Sorry if this is a repost. Elephants and lions unleashed on North America? 18:00 17 August 2005 NewScientist.com news service Kurt Kleiner Elephants, lions, cheetahs and camels could one day roam the western US under a proposal to recreate North American landscapes as they existed more than 13,000 years ago, when humans first encountered them. The plan, proposed in a commentary in Nature and co-authored by 13 ecologists and conservation biologists, would help enrich a North American ecosystem that was left almost devoid of large mammals at the end of the Pleistocene period. It would also help preserve wildlife that...

Elephants, lions, cheetahs and camels could one day roam the western US under a proposal to recreate North American landscapes as they existed more than 13,000 years ago, when humans first encountered them. The plan, proposed in a commentary in Nature and co-authored by 13 ecologists and conservation biologists, would help enrich a North American ecosystem that was left almost devoid of large mammals at the end of the Pleistocene period. It would also help preserve wildlife that faces the threat of extinction in Africa and Asia. Between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, 97 of 150 genera of large mammals...