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.
Stay out of Cuyahoga County.
I’m in Summit, but Cuyahoga is just a few blocks away. Where did these things come from? I didn’t see them all Summer, but now that the heat is on, they’re showing up.
One hit my windshield, and it was a hellova mess. Guess I’ll stay down here in the conservative part of the state.
Do you think the Elephant, the pride of the GOP is a purposeless beastie? The Mammoth is it’s older bro with a wooly coat so it can move lumber in Alaska as well as the tropics.
How do you know it can be trained? The people of India have spent 1000s of years training elephants. African elephants, not so much. How do we know if Wooly Mamouths can be trained at all?
Think of the tremendous cost that this project would entail,if it is successful. Why? We have bulldozers and other moving machines that can move anything in Alaska that we need moved.
It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.
Even the scientist who cloned Dolly says that it is not practical to clone animals. Hundreds of attempts had to be abandoned because of deformaties, and even the ones that were successful had to be put down early because they aged at a rapid rate.
It’s hard and expensive to move bulldozers to Alaska, never mind parts for repairs etc. Move a mating couple of wooly beasties up there and you don’t need to move anymore.
How do you know the wooly mammoth wasn’t trained? Somebody had to help Fred Flinstone. The people of India are not the only ones with a history of training elephants and Hannibal may have been using African elephants since he was from north Africa. It has been over 30 years since I took vertebrate zoology but my prof for the course was a paleozoologist and we had many conversations about the mammoth....I’ve been fascinated by elephants, old style and new since early childhood when I had my first ride on one.
Wow. Well, I may be in the minority here, but I think a *living* Woolly Mammoth would be the coolest thing ever!!!!
But forget about trying to train it as anything. The bleeding hearts will never allow that. Heck, they probably wouldn’t even want to see it in a zoo — only a special high-$$$$ sanctuary. And they probably wouldn’t even allow visitors in to see it because it would upset the mammoth. Sheesh!
“Even the elephant was used to cross the Alps by Hannibal”
Apparently those were a small North African variety that no longer exists.
But, just think of the compost pile posibilities!Take DNA from the clone(s), and then slice into that an elephant Y chromosome, and use that second generation....
Wonder if they would eat salt cedar or kudzu?
Whatever else you may do, do NOT resuscitate.
Yes. Wait till the enviros free them.
Whoops.
imagine the size of the bucket of slaw...
On a side note I'm kinda glad they went extinct. 'Mammoth Bill Cody' doesn't have the same ring to it as Buffalo Bill Cody ;-)
Just because they supposedly ‘can’ doesn’t mean they should. Didn’t work out so well for Dr. Moreau.
p.s. I have ‘Jeepster’ on my Ipod.
I have been predicting this turn of events for at least five years.
No doubt we will have herds of woolies on the Great Plains in our future.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Actually, I think it would be fascinating to see a real live woolly mammoth. Clone away! It’s the next best thing to a time machine. Bring the past here to us, rather than travelling back into it. What a thrill. A new form of exploration of the past.
Now dinosaurs, not so much .......
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, I wish everyone would curb their enthusiasm for making fantasies real.
Head mounts in the den. You are going to need a bigger den:)
I thought you were going to ask me to donate some DNA for this worthy project Mr Ranch?
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