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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
Let's start a petition: I promised my kids a baby Mammoth ride.
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!!!
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.
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
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 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.
They found a frozen child in your pants?! Dear god someone contact the FBI.
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?
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! =:-|
Will it blend?
(sorry, i just saw... never mind, my fault...)
I feel like death on a soda cracker.
With apologies to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag archipelago".
ou know it takes years to do that stuff, right?
I dare you to find a quote that says they will do this, without sort of caveat like "If there is good DNA"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
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,
I think what it has in its other hand will be a significant clue.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The ice and permafrost will have melted and shifted a little recently to expose the body. This isn't to say anything about global warming as it's a fairly regular occurence in the trans-polar regions. Mammoths and lost mountaineers are lost and exposed all the time.
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
Am I the only one who thinks the title of this article should've been "Baby Mammoth REMAINS found Intact?" I was so mislead :)
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 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.