Woolly Mammoth to be Cloned

RomanNose · 6 Dec 2011 at 08:31

Within 5 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.

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Grigoriev and his team, along with Japan's Kinki University, have announced that they will launch a joint research project next year aimed at recreating the enormous mammal, which went extinct around 10,000 years ago.

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.

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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 1990's. 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.

Is it such a good idea, however, to clone animals that have long been extinct? For a while there's been some discussion of a real life Jurassic Park setup containing such animals. Introducing these beasts into existing ecosystems could be like bringing in a potentially invasive species that would try to fill some space presently held by other animal(s). Even if the cloned animals were contained in special parks, there could still be a risk of spreading.

So if the woolly mammoth is successfully cloned sooner rather than later, we'd probably be left with more questions and controversy than answers, at least in the short term.

http://news.discovery.com/animals/woolly-mammoth-cloned-111205.html#mkcpgn=rssnws1
Awesome! I for one welcome our fluffy elephant overlords. I hope these scientists keep smashing elephants back doors in until they are successful.

Marine Iguana · 6 Dec 2011 at 08:33

I demand loads of mammoths be recreated and we can run them off the cliffs of Dover and kill them all off again.

Ceiling_Cat · 6 Dec 2011 at 08:34

This doesn't sit right with me.

NeverWinter · 6 Dec 2011 at 08:34

I can't wait to try a Mammoth burger.

SeraphX · 6 Dec 2011 at 08:35

Whats the point tbh? they died out due to man hunting them, how would it be any different today?

NeverWinter · 6 Dec 2011 at 08:38

Seraph said:
Whats the point tbh? they died out due to man hunting them, how would it be any different today?

I don't see them being let run wild, surely they'd only be held in captive.

SeraphX · 6 Dec 2011 at 08:41

NeverWinter said:
I don't see them being let run wild, surely they'd only be held in captive.

great, so their being brought back for mindless morons to gape at through bars and such.

Sometimes i wish humankind wasn't top of the food chain, i wish for something bigger and nastier to come and endanger this species, just so everyone can properly see what it's like, how nasty it is

Ceiling_Cat · 6 Dec 2011 at 08:42

Seraph said:
great, so their being brought back for mindless morons to gape at through bars and such.

Sometimes i wish humankind wasn't top of the food chain, i wish for something bigger and nastier to come and endanger this species, just so everyone can properly see what it's like, how nasty it is

You wouldn't be saying the above if you'd have a tiger gnawing at your leg. back down.

alx · 6 Dec 2011 at 08:45

Seraph said:
great, so their being brought back for mindless morons to gape at through bars and such.

Sometimes i wish humankind wasn't top of the food chain, i wish for something bigger and nastier to come and endanger this species, just so everyone can properly see what it's like, how nasty it is

You never know, they may eventually let them 'run wild' if it's deemed safe and sensible to do so.

SeraphX · 6 Dec 2011 at 08:45

Ceiling_Cat said:
You wouldn't be saying the above if you'd have a tiger gnawing at your leg. back down.

I won't back down, this is what i'm getting at, Mankind thinking it's all that and playing god with other animals that live here, christ, the animals have been on earth longer than man,

what makes mankind so special? we chop things down, we blow things up, we kill in the name of science, experimentation, and god knows what else......

bhavv · 6 Dec 2011 at 08:47

Seraph said:
great, so their being brought back for mindless morons to gape at through bars and such.

Sometimes i wish humankind wasn't top of the food chain, i wish for something bigger and nastier to come and endanger this species, just so everyone can properly see what it's like, how nasty it is

But everything that humans do to animals is completely humane.

Id really like to see Wooly Mammoths bought back to life though.

SeraphX · 6 Dec 2011 at 08:48

bhavv said:
But everything that humans do to animals is completely humane.

Id really like to see Wooly Mammoths bought back to life though.

a human says it's humane?

what would the animal say if it could?

what would the human say if it was the animal saying, your going to die but it's alright, it'll be humane?

The IPB · 6 Dec 2011 at 09:00

I'd like to see them do it purely for the scientific aspect of it.

But I wouldn't want them creating loads of them and putting them in zoo's.

Ceiling_Cat · 6 Dec 2011 at 09:01

Seraph said:
I won't back down, this is what i'm getting at, Mankind thinking it's all that and playing god with other animals that live here, christ, the animals have been on earth longer than man,

what makes mankind so special? we chop things down, we blow things up, we kill in the name of science, experimentation, and god knows what else......

You better get off the internet and go live in a cave if you're so opposed to it all.

Marine Iguana · 6 Dec 2011 at 09:02

Seraph said:
a human says it's humane?

what would the animal say if it could?

what would the human say if it was the animal saying, your going to die but it's alright, it'll be humane?

It's how we have evolved mammoths didn't evolve and thus died out humans (some of them) are awesome!

Angst · 6 Dec 2011 at 09:02

Seraph said:
a human says it's humane?

what would the animal say if it could?

what would the human say if it was the animal saying, your going to die but it's alright, it'll be humane?

I think it would prefer it to been ripped to shreads by a pack of sabre tooth tigers.

NeverWinter · 6 Dec 2011 at 09:02

Ceiling_Cat said:
You better get off the internet and go live in a cave if you're so opposed to it all.

+1

Castiel · 6 Dec 2011 at 09:03

Moral issues aside....it was probably our foremost natural foodstuff originally so if Mammoths can be cloned and subsequently bred in sufficient numbers it may be another source of healthier meat.

bhavv · 6 Dec 2011 at 09:08

Castiel said:
Moral issues aside....it was probably our foremost natural foodstuff originally so if Mammoths can be cloned and subsequently bred in sufficient numbers it may be another source of healthier meat.

And so were domesticated dogs in Peru and China.

B@Th*nG · 6 Dec 2011 at 09:12

this will be awesome

B@