So Yahoo! News is reporting that scientists in Russia and Japan are tag-teaming on an effort that hopes to resurrect the woolly mammoth within the next five years. A thigh bone of one of the hairy beasts was found under the permafrost in Siberia, keeping the marrow inside well preserved.
Scientists from The Sakha Republic's mammoth museum and Japan's Kinki University hope to defy nature and clone the animal using DNA taken from the marrow and introduced it to the the nucleus of a common elephant egg. The next step would then be to implant the embryo into the womb of an elephant in order to be delivered. It sounds like something right out of a Michael Crichton novel, but scientists don't foresee many complications since the two species are closely related. If successful, we may see the first live mammoth in more than 10,000 years walking the Earth by 2016.
Why stop there? If we can bring the animal back, why not genetically alter it to become miniaturized? We could have mammoth rides at kids birthday parties. Or we could even domesticate them. Wouldn't you want to have a pet mini-mammoth? How cool would that be?
Source: Yahoo! News
Nerd, can they make me a mammoth the size of a small lab?
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