Could Mammoths Be Reborn in Four Years?

[Greg Bernhardt]

Mammoth 'could be reborn in four years'

What does everyone think of this? I remember hearing a while back it would take several generations of in between species or something before we got a full blown Mammoth! I think this could really boost zoo attendance :)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8257223/Mammoth-could-be-reborn-in-four-years.html

 

[phyzguy]

I think it's great! Humans probably drove them to extinction anyway, why shouldn't we be responsible for bringing them back? Will "Jurassic Park" ever be possible, or is that just a pipe dream?

 

[Janus]

Will "Jurassic Park" ever be possible, or is that just a pipe dream?

Well, maybe "Pleistocene Park".

 

[Andre]

About that cloning, I translated a few paragraphs about that from French to English for a book about the Yukagir mammoth to be published the Expo in Japan.

(THE YUKAGIR MAMMOTH - An Animal of the Cold Steppe
by Dick Mol, Bernard Buigues, Alexei Tikhonov, Naoki Suzuki, Peter Lazarev,
Bas van Geel and Gennady Boeskorov.)

However it was only translated and produced in Japanese, anyway a quote:

As a way around these obstacles to finding intact cells, Japanese specialists have argued that it would be possible for the sperm of a mammoth bull to withstand the stress of freezing and thawing and still be fertile. Therefore, Japanese teams have been scouting around Siberia for several years now in search of a male carcass with its testicles preserved. The plan is to inseminate Asian (Indian) elephant cows with his sperm. The result could be a hybrid, and if a fertile female calf was produced, a meticulous breeding program could be established to distill the pure genes of the woolly mammoth species after a few generations, in about 50 years’ time. The chances of fertile offspring are not as remote as might be expected. Although the number of chromosomes of mammoths (58) is different from elephants (56), successful fertile crossbreeding has been demonstrated with different species of buffaloes, also with different numbers of chromosomes...
...

I think it's great! Humans probably drove them to extinction anyway, why shouldn't we be responsible for bringing them back? Will "Jurassic Park" ever be possible, or is that just a pipe dream?

That claim is unproven still. It would need to produce archeologic evidence of the presence of men, codated and colocated with the youngest mammoth fossil remains, like in the Taimyr peninsula in North Sibera and Wrangel Island, where the youngest fossils are carbon dated at ~3600 years. See this thread

 

[ranjette]

Is there any human cloning done?