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."
some scrambled T-rex eggs, but then again I'm just that type of mutha fuckin balla.
The Jurassic Park-esque cloning talk is definitely going to be the focus of most of the discussion, but have any of the articles mentioned how well the tissues, organs, and fluids are preserved? This seems like an extraordinary chance to find hard evidence on what caused their extinction.
Time to extract the DNA and impregnate an African elephant to mess with nature in a way we shouldn't.
622677120
I've heard that scientists hope to extract DNA from a mammoth and then use that to make one (by means of a female elephant). I wonder if there are still scientists hoping to clone a mammoth, and if so, I wonder if this baby mammoth has some good DNA (to date, all known mammoths' DNA had degraded too much for use).
Let's start a petition: I promised my kids a baby Mammoth ride.
From what I have read about this find, there are probably no cells that haven't been destroyed from the freezing process that would help produce a clone of the animal, there is always hope that some may still be intact.
It seems the the Siberian mammoth population has tripled in the past 6 months...
clone it. clone it! clone it!! what good is all this "science" if we don't CLONE IT!!!
Sure everyone expects the clone expert to generate the best dinosaurs since Noah's ark.
But wait, if "global warming" ended the last ice age and drove cold-adapted species to extinction, then either a) cavemen had cars (hence the GEICO ads) or b) "global warming" can be a natural phenomenon.
I'm confused - we'd better ask Leonardo DiCaprio what he's been paid to think about all this!
Wikipedia article on Draenei in case anybody is as lost as I am. This is the great thing about wikipedia over any other traditional encyclopedia. Although some may say it's not as accurate, or reliable, it definitely has a wider breadth of knowledge and obscure articles than any other encyclopedia I've ever seen.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
How should it be prepared? I'm sure whatever they decide, it will be delicious.
Not only humans made mamooths extinct, but we also unearth all of their remains so that the next intelligent species after our own extinction won't find any of them, at least not in good shape.
God must have put it there just to drive fundamentalists crazy ;-)
Is that you ?
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
I suspect it will blend, into a quite interesting mammoth smoothie, but Blendtec will probably have to come up with a much larger blender for Tom to use.
Nobody in that video seems to be too concerned about the girl thawing and starting to rot. I'd expect it to rot in short order.
This was reported on the internet super-crawl-way about 6 days ago!
My web domain.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
In either case, the important question to be answered after having encountered the finest example of something we've never seen before is, "Will it Blend?"
*Note: I am not in any way affiliated with that site. I just want to see more crap go into blenders and be filmed.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
A Mammoth? That's huge.
I was surprised to read(in the iPhone: will it blend story) how many people haven't seen it. I would have been telling everyone about it, I just assumed I was the last to know.
In case you don't know, you can go to WillItBlend.com and suggest stuff to blend.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They found a frozen child in your pants?! Dear god someone contact the FBI.
The fact that it is old also works against the clonning...
Rethinking email
didn't we find a frozen male ages ago now we can clone them both, and while i spend my time on the internet reading slashdot so I'm not too familiar with the mechanics of it, get them to mate and produce a whole army of mammoths, for meat and pets and giant woolly steads to conquer siberia.
Dead as a doorknob, but yeah, otherwise intact.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Biologists are getting good at sequencing DNA very fast. This is done by breaking many copies of the DNA up into little overlapping pieces which are separately sequenced; then these overlapping subsequences are fit together, like a puzzle. A bunch of mostly intact DNA would be a lot like a bunch of mostly intact copies of the same puzzle. I would expect that it should be possible to get a completely correct sequence as long as the DNA in some of the cells isn't too badly damaged. They could also get a lot of help in this process from the sequences of close modern relatives. Synthesizing a complete undamaged copy of the DNA should eventually be possible. Maybe it could be done by doing search/replace using the diff's from a modern relative?
Dude what the hell are you trying to listen for ..there is no heartbeat it's been dead for 10,000+ years
I want to share this discovery with my children which are very interested in dinosaurs and past forms of life that populated the earth ages ago.
I'd like to have more pictures than the currently released.
If you find a good source of pictures please reply to this post. Thanks.
I can tell that they are going to be very excited about this!!
and they will ask me tons of questions! =:-|
It's ok! Believe me, they will discover something even better!
The next intelligent species will find us and be amazed at how many human corpses they've found lying around next to an artifact with what seems to be a mice-shaped object in their hand. It might take them a while to guess what we were doing, unless Slashdot plans to be around by the year five million.
http://www.varley.net/Pages/Books/Mammoth.htm
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Why was it not buried deep in the snow/ground?
(I do not mean to advocate anything, just would like to know).
Will it blend?
(sorry, i just saw... never mind, my fault...)
I feel like death on a soda cracker.
I was reading Clive Cussler's Polar Shift yesterday, which has a fictional discovery of a baby Mammoth in Siberia. Then, I click on my /. RSS feed today, and there it is as the first entry.
In the book, I think they were planning to clone it with an elephant.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
Hmmm . . .
A. Sarcastic humor. When replying to a funny post, one usually tries to also be funny. Or, so I've observed.
B. Brevity. Because long posts aren't funny and nobody reads them. Or, so I've been told.
C. Geology professor. At least, that's what my 20-50 students call me every semester.
Snippyness aside, I have read up on the issue. Extensively. Climatology isn't my specialty, but I understand it enough to know its an incredibly complex field. I will never disagree that promoting energy efficiency, recycling, renewable energy, and large-scale reforesting endeavors are good things. But, I worry that scaring people into "going green" by declaring a climate crisis may backfire and seriously injure the credibility of all scientists. Its bad enough that FDA screw-ups are causing many parents to forego immunizing their children against serious diseases. Imagine what will happen if all of Earth science gets written off as a bunch of over-zealous, money-grubbing hippies.
I really believe that we need more time and research before we declare ourselves the murders of Mother Earth. And, when I say research I don't mean surveys on environmental awareness and expeditions to take pictures of polar bears. I mean proper calibration of weather satellites so that they stop indicating cooling while ground stations measure warming, better correlation of the rock and ice core records with the Earth's 100Ka eccentricity cycle, and so on. There's still a lot to global warming that we don't understand entirely. If we promise people that buying a hybrid car will stop global warming and it doesn't, they're going to be upset. Torches-and-pitchforks upset.
And don't even get me started on the utter disinformation and confusion that the well-intentioned, well-paid celebrity activists and politicians are spreading. How does not using plastic bottles fix the climate? How does biodiesel reduce carbon emissions? Who decided "clean" and "coal" should go in the same sentence? Why is that when the state geologist goes in and tells beach-front property owners that dumping a million dollars worth of sand in front of their house that they've built five feet from the high-tide line won't save them from the next storm, nobody listens? But, when some dim-witted celebrity bats their eyelashes at a camera and tells people that the Earth is dying, women swoon and grown men cry!
Global warming is happening, most likely. I'm not yet convinced human activity is the sole cause and its arrogant and anthrocentric to assume that we are. The public should be educated about the Earth and the environment, not scared into action. We should cut back on carbon emissions because it makes the air clean and improves the economy, not to save the polar bears. People are more amenable to small steps with goals and results observable in their own lifetimes. Its bad enough our government is running on reactionary fear right now, I don't want to see science end up the same way.
I knew I should have "does wooly mammoth taste like chicken?" joke . . .
Instantly frozen in a historical world wide catastrophe aka the flood!
Jedis are stupid. If they were so powerful, why couldn't they handle counseling for a kid who missed his mom?
Yeah, but does Mammoth turn into Van Halen? That is the question.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
As opposed to all of the ones they've found that have been neutered?
No, it was God's Will not to stop him. Get with the program! The official line seems to be that God is omnipotent but chooses through His wisdom to never do anything, ever.
I remember the fuss they made over that mammoth DC recovered a fear years back. They were going to do all this DNA mixing with modern elephants yadayada, and still to this day I haven't heard anything else about it. Great that they found the mammoth baby, but at this point its boy who cries wolf when they claim they can potentially mix the DNA. No more false promises or "possiblies" until proven.
Like Ebaums World? You'll love Shizzville
How does biodiesel reduce carbon emissions?
If your biodiesel completely comes from a self-sufficient production derived from vegetal matter, you certainly cannot make emissions higher. Since some of the carbon used by plants is unavailable on the next round, carbon dioxide concentration in air or water will go down.
If you want references to back up my assertion, ask and I will try to comply. My central resource is written in spanish, but I think I can find other references in english. Unfortunately, I can't cite them right now.
With apologies to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag archipelago".
I know it's sick, but that list of critters made my belly rumble. Mmm... meat.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
What's the state of the art in DNA from recently extinct animals (like saber-tooth tigers and mammoths)? Are these animals firmly placed in current cladistic taxonomy? Are there still cool things to be learned from their DNA?
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Ahh, lethargy, just what I look for in a god.
For all those who know not of it : http://www.willitblend.com/
"Will it blend" is old now, I'm wondering why it is appearing on slashdot at all. They've already proved that anything electronic will blend into a pile of grey dust, and yes, most other things will blend too. Though I refer you to this :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM94aorYVS4
whenever mankind shows up
You mean we've showed up before? I am interested in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter
On viewing the dead baby mammoth, Bill Clinton stated that he was impressed with its beauty, and wanted to have a date with it.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I don't think you can get through to people with long winded posts any more. People just want quick bullet points. Here are two :
Carbon Dioxide is rising, hugely in our atmosphere
Carbon Dioxide does contribute to global warming.
Now, you can pontificate all you like, but those are facts - no scientist at all denies those. What some scientists claim with regards to global warming is the amount of carbon dioxide produced by humankind is insignificant comparative to the amount produced naturally. I'm not a climate scientist either, all I know for certain is the first 2 points. I personally believe that we are causing CO2 rises in our atmosphere.
The trouble is, the amount of land required to replace petroleum is immense. Look, for example, at countries like the UK. There is nowhere near enough land to grow fuel on - if you haven't been to the UK, it's basically all food farmland or towns and cities now. By growing fuel crops, you will cut into the food crops, and require food to be imported.
That being said, my parents grow trees and chop them down and use them for heating. Wood burning is essentially carbon neutral when you plant more trees. They've got more land than most though, though nothing substantial.
As we read this, some restaurant in Los Angeles is preparing to offer pan seared baby siberian mammoth with macadamia crusted Hawaiian octosquid.
That would be some nasty freezer burn :(
What a marvel wikipedia is! Perhaps one day somebody else will find an alternative way that you can type in a word you don't know and find information about it. Until then, wikipedia for the win!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Then again, all this relies on biodiesel production being self-sufficient in the long term. I won't talk about whether it can be, though I have read some texts that point to it being achievable.
Exactly. It's a reference to the Chapelle show.
So mammoths tasted better or reproduced slower than for example elephants? Bears taste good but don't seem to have been generally hunted into extinction even where humans appeared suddently.
But yes, mammoths may have been easier to hunt than elephants as they hadn't time to adapt to better and better human hunters.
Spain as a provider for fuel sounds much safer to me then Iraq, Iran etc...
"You superiour intellect is no match for our puny weapons" - The Simpsons
See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. The first two statements are simple facts. The second two statements are also true but appear to conflict with the first two because they are less simple. The average person looks at this tiny slice of the climate debate and comes away confused or disinterested.
So, either scientists censor themselves in public and turn climatology into a series of dogmatic t-shirt slogans or we use the current interest in climate change as an opportunity to teach people about the Earth and improve science education. Then maybe we will be able to clone up some wooly mammoths!
i would respond with qualifiers:
1. the megafauna i'm talking about would be the herbivores
2. the megafauna in the cold climates/ on islands are for more vulnerable than those in the tropics: easier hunting. there are also less food choices in cold climes. and slow reproducing island species are extremely vulnerable to extinction just by being small in number to begin with
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
A six month old, frozen, abandoned mammoth? Where were the parents?
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
But then, where would the UK get its tomatoes from?
Am I the only one who thinks the title of this article should've been "Baby Mammoth REMAINS found Intact?" I was so mislead :)
I saw that yesterday...I suggested a Kevlar vest.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Their genes can and do carry deceases we're not familiar with. Probably not resistant to Penicillin though.
:D
Yup, I've seen that X-Files episode too
But thinking that mammoths aren't that far back in the history of the world, and they stopped existing (not us), I think nothing majorly bad would happen out of this (if it was the case).
It would be a very bad idea if you don't intend to replenish it, of course ;-) I never meant to go and raze the area.
Don't worry, there is space for both here in Spain. And then there's always Morocco, just a jump (for some values of jump) away.
Well, there's always "never even evolved".
Actually, according to Creationists, that's pretty damn near everything - so I guess for them it's "well done"!
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
Because yesterday, Slashdot had an article about whether or not iPhone will blend.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Sorry, it had to be done!
America, Home of the Brave.
what about the dodo
Links:
Back in my day, we had to type words into Google and then wade through dozens, possibly hundreds of web-sites to get the answer we wanted!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Most of the megafauna are also those that didn't co-evolve with humans.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I *really* doubt that saber-tooth tigers were tasty. That's not the reputation that cats have.
I suspect that people contributed to the extinction of those animals (and of other less spectacular species) not only by eating them, but also by carrying diseases that they had not co-evolved with. Also, in the case of the saber-tooth, e.g., by competing for the same food supply. (Mammoths, perhaps. One of the recorded ways of hunting mammoths is to set a grass-fire and stampede a herd over a cliff.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Also coincident with the end of the ice age environment these species were adapted to. The humans back then probably scavenged more than they hunted; easy pickings.
Also, one has to wonder why the buffalo, the moose, and the deer, which replaced the ice age herbivores in North America, weren't wiped out by human over-hunting. They seem a lot easier to kill than mastodon. Maybe it's because humans didn't start over-hunting other species until we developed guns?
That's a good idea, although it really makes me wonder. As I understand it, Kevlar actually cuts very easily (they specifically warn that a Kevlar vest will not stop a knife), but the tight fiber groupings allow it to distribute blunt force impacts very effectively. This makes me wonder if when you put it in the blender it will shred, or will all the fibers get bound up in the blades and drive shaft and burn the motor out?
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
That's well known. Pigs and dogs brought by people ate them and their eggs. Slow flightless birds made easy targets. People tried eating them, but found they weren't very tasty.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
i know but still the giant irish elk is also a very famous example if you've ever opened a child's book about
... they have no taste when it comes to food imo
extincted species, and many kids have since everybody loves dinosaurs
but i always thought it were solely the people of the netherlands who were responsible for
the demise of the dodo race, since well to be frank
Ozzie was preserved pretty well frozen too, but is only 5000 some years old, slightly older than the oldest desert mummies. Maybe global warming will reveal a human who fell into a crevice and froze to death tens of thousands of years ago. One of side-effects of global warming.
When 40,000 years old you reach, look as good you will not!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070711/ts_nm/russia_m ammoth_dc_2
e arth/2007/07/11/scibaby111.xml
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/
This CANNOT POSSIBLY be a troll - this is "-1 I don't agree with you".
1. Greek Gods
2. Cobol Programmers
3. Managers... Oh a guy can dream, can't he?
And why he was in that place, don't you?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I suspect that mastadons had a harder time hiding from people, reproduced at a much slower rate than the other animals, and had issues with their food supply relating to the change of climate at the end of the last ice age (they no doubt required a lot of food to survive). That combined with steady human predation no doubt drove them to extinction. However, I don't think humans were the primary cause of mammoth extinction. I imagine that if they reproduced as quickly as horse or deer, and ate much less food, they would still be around today.
What I find strange is that horses became extinct in the Americas, but not in Eurasia. I don't see any cause for that to happen.