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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.
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...
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!
not at all, humans killed off mammoths in the first place, brining them back would be righting a wrong of sorts.
Of course, what I _really_ want to see brought back is the giant ground sloth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatherium
Imagine a huge furry clawed creature the size of a bull elephant wandering around on its hind legs towering over 20 feet tall. I can't wait.
http://notanumber.net/
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.
To be fair, the purpose isn't to "mess with nature." It's not like scientists are saying, "Let's screw up the natural order of things," right? The point of doing this, if it's even possible, would be some combination of these closely related reasons: (1) satisfying our curiosity about what these things were like, (2) giving a species a second chance to live, (3) creating something interesting that no living human has seen, and (4) profiting from building an Ice Age Park. Aren't any of those legitimate reasons?
Revive the Constitution.
I feel like death on a soda cracker.
With apologies to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag archipelago".
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 point of doing this, if it's even possible, would be some combination of these closely related reasons: (1) satisfying our curiosity about what these things were like, (2) giving a species a second chance to live, (3) creating something interesting that no living human has seen, and (4) profiting from building an Ice Age Park. Aren't any of those legitimate reasons?
It's a question of perspective. We can't possibly mess with natural order since we're part of nature. If we separate ourselves from the rest of the animals, then absolutely everything we do messes with natural order, even breathing air in and out (we're stealing oxygen that belongs to nature!).
There's a simpler guide: if we do it, would it result in a better (or neutral) situation for nature, and us, or worse?
- Artificial ingredients in food that harms us: don't do it.
- Artificial ingredients in food proven to not harm us: do it.
- Genetically engineered food: it's again a case-per-case basis, no ultimate stance.
- Revive ancient beasts: sounds like fun, what could go wrong? Are they gonna multiply overnight and take over the world?
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?