Slashdot Mirror
Baby Mammoth Found Intact
knoll99 writes "Scientists unveiled the discovery Wednesday of a baby mammoth found in the permafrost of north-west Siberia. The remains of the six-month-old female mammoth were discovered in a remarkable state of preservation on the Yamal peninsula of Russia in May, a Reuters report said. The specimen is believed to be the best of its kind to date."
us
whenever mankind shows up, the slowly reproducing, tasty giant beasts and megafauna disappear, sometimes pretty quicky
off the top of my head, it happened to
the auroch
the irish elk
the moa
steller's sea cow (wiped out in 30 years, go progress!)
i'm sure slashdotters here could pull out a couple of dozen other examples
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
A team of French, American, Dutch and Russian paleontologists successfully airlifted a male, 23 tonne (25 ton) woolly mammoth from its grave in Siberia where it had been frozen for 20,000 years. It was almost complete except for its head which had been exposed to air in the past. Since the species has been extinct for over 10,000 years, some scientists have proposed that attempts be made to breed a living mammoth from DNA, sperm or cell nucleus retrieved from the carcass. A modern elephant ovum would be used, because it is the closest living relative to the mammoth. This, sounds like the story I read about in which the scientists later decided the DNA was too degraded to use. As of the time I read the story the scientists were supposedly just hoping for a better specimen to come along. Perhaps they have one now.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn describes how the zeks ate a frozen mammoth raw before it could be studied. This has more to do with their inadequate diet than how tasty mammoth is.