Bringing the extinct Woolly Mammoth back to life (Video)
Woolly mammoths were quite common in northern Eurasia and North American tens of thousands of year ago. They weren't much taller than African elephants but they were much larger and heavier. A fully grown mammoth could weigh up to 8 tons. They disappeared from the earth about 10,000 years ago during the Pleistocene era. They are however quite well known to scientists today because unlike other prehistoric animals many of their remains were not literally fossilized. This was due in part to the frozen climate they lived in and also to their massive size.
Although they have been extinct for thousands of years now there is talk about bringing them back to life due to advances in the science of DNA and a recent mammoth discovery. A well preserved woolly mammoth thigh bone that was discovered in August of this year in the permafrost soil of Siberia is causing all the talk. Japanese and Russian scientists are teaming up at the Sakha Republic's mammoth museum and Japan's Kinki University where they are launching a jointly funded research project next year with the goal of bringing the giant mammoth back to life. They believe they could possibly make a clone of the woolly mammoth within the next five years.
In order to clone a woolly mammoth, the perfectly intact bone marrow from this thigh bone has made it a great possibility. Scientists will extract cells from the mammoth and then replace the nuclei of egg cells from a modern elephant with those taken from the mammoth bone marrow cells. This should produce embryos with mammoth DNA. The embryos will then be implanted into elephant wombs for delivery. Since elephants and mammoths are so closely related it is speculated that all should go well. The whole process is probably going to take about four years from the starting point - two years to impregnate the elephant, and another two years for the gestation. The birth of a baby mammoth however might be quite trying for a typical female elephant due to their larger size.
Although this is very exciting news that seems to bring images of the movie "Jurassic Park" into mind, there is little need for this worry. The big difference is that there are not fully intact DNA samples available from the scarier dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus Rex. An interesting fact to note also is that it was only because of global warming that this mammoth bone was discovered.
For better or worse.
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