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Most of Woolly Mammoth Genome Reconstructed
geekmansworld writes "From the Washington Post, 'An international team of scientists has reconstructed more than three-quarters of the genome of the woolly mammoth using DNA extracted from balls of hair, the first time this has been accomplished for an extinct species.' Who wants a pet mammoth?"
I for one welcome the new hirsute elephantine overlords
Given that they have yet to work out how many chromosomes the woolly mammoth had, or which of the DNA features are genuine mutations, and which are artefacts caused by damage since the death of the creatures from whom DNA was extracted, there's a fair distance to go yet.
Still, I don't doubt this is a seriously fun project to be working on. I'd love to get involved.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
and I just spent 20000g on my new mammoth mount
the numbers of woolly mammoths has tripled in the past six months...
As a kid I always thought that Wooly Mammoths died out aroud the same time as the dinosaurs but I heard a while back that they might have been around until a couple of thousand years ago. I now know that man hunted them to the dinosaur date is wrong but when did the last one shed it's mortal coil?
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
And I thought cats were disgusting...
Blank until
with those from the Tasmanian Devil ala Jurassic Park. What could possibly go wrong?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
It could be the solution of how how to maintain legacy systems in generations to come. They just need to start mapping the genes of a COBOL programmer.
We need to begin work on the non-neotenacious version of an ostritch. (Larry Niven fans will get this. For the rest of you, see "Bird in Hand" from his anthology "Flight of the Horse".)
Why you put hairyballs as a tag? lol
There are woolly mammoths in the latest World of Warcraft expansion. They're huge, fierce, and scary looking.
Cool! Let's make one - I want one for a pet!
I'd rather have a pet dodo personally.
Not to mention, didn't we also have this story about how the proteins affect the transcription too, and the same piece of DNA can be transcribed in a dozen different ways or not at all, depending on how those proteins regulate it? It seems to me like in that case it's like saying they decoded half of it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
hmm DNA extracted from hairs of balls would be more interesting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/science/20mammoth.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
right NOW, we can do this
apparently it would be tedious, but a number of technical hurdles have been overcome lately to the point where this is really conceivable to do, and the talk about doing it isnot theoretical, but practical
1. most recent modern genome decoders don't care that the dna is shredded into pieces
2. encapsulated in keratin (hair), the dna is not so tainted by bacterial dna like it is in bone
3. a new technique allows modifying modern elephant dna 50,000 genomic sites at a time, rather than one by one, so the proper egg can be arrived at after a few generations of reconstruction, implanted in a female elephant, and voila
this can be done, right NOW!
amazing
even more freaky: we can do the same, right now, with neanderthal!
using chimpanzee as a starting point for ethical considerations, we can also, right NOW, bring a neanderthal back to life
that's pretty freaky. these guys wouldn't be dumb. someone would have to explain to the guy that he is not the last of his species, he's an artifically reconstructed clone of a guy who died 50,000 years ago. no one of his kind exists anymore
but we revived a wooly old friend of yours too. here's a spear, happy hunting
just don't eat the dodo
or the quagga
or the irish elk
or the auroch
or the sabretooth though
really really freaky and amazing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
My g/f was looking over my shoulder and proclaimed she already had a pet wooly mammoth and looked at me :(
You like mammoth?
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
I have 20,000 gold. can I have one now?
by just plucking one of RMS's many hairs.
If they have well preserved (i.e. frozen) specimens, why not just harvest eggs and sperm, mix, shake well, implant in an elephant, wait 22 months, and profit^H^H^H^H^H^H^H see what comes out.
Do they taste good??
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
*sigh*
I wonder what it will taste like, anyways, it will feed a small village for a week in africa, so I definitely think we should bring them back in armies and replace killing of smaller mammals for food...1 kill = food for 1 vs. 1 kill = food for 10!
You inconsiderate bast*ards.
If we are able to design an animal, would this mean intelligent design, or would it mean evolution at its best? (There goes the karma)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The article itself says that "about two-thirds" of the genome has been reconstructed, not "more than three-quarters," as the teaser says.
http://xkcd.com/292/
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Crocodilians do not come from dinosaurs, although they are related, i.e. their earliest common ancestor was neither a dinosaur nor a crocodilian. On the other hand, the earliest common ancestor of birds was a dinosaur.
Also, mammals existed at least 125Mya:
The oldest known marsupial is Sinodelphys, found in 125M-year old early Cretaceous shale in China's northeastern Liaoning Province. The fossil is nearly complete and includes tufts of fur and imprints of soft tissues.
The correct tag for this would be eyreaffair, not jurassicpark. In The Eyre Affair there were resurrected mammoths wandering around the British countryside (and since they were an endangered species you weren't allowed to interfere with their migration patterns).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Mastodons?
They seem to have lived later than the mammoths like 10,000 years ago
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
How about making little potbellied woolly mammoths?
Technoli
Which would you rather her to call you?
a) pet woolly mammoth
b) neanderthal
c) dinosaur
d) Fred
e) Cowboy Neal
Yeah, but who wants 3/4 of a Wooly Mammoth? Aren't we at least 98% similar in DNA to earthworms? Let me know when the whole genome is reconstructed. :)
global worming -> global ice age
Sure cloning a mammoth would be cool, but I think we all need to ask ourselves some important ethical questions beforehand. For instance, will it run linux?
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Wait a sec -- if we're as close as that -
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/science/20mammoth.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink [nytimes.com]
- to resurrecting members of extinct species -- how far are we from being able to select "valuable human beings" to have another go?
We have Einstein's brain tissue, at least -- probably more? He is universally revered - and even those that might think it wouldn't work would be interested to see whether or not it did. Might not the "purely good" motive here be enough to overcome the objections on the part of those who think human cloning is morally wrong?
The case could certainly be made and the already prevalent use of donor sperm pretty much ensures that there would be plenty of women lined up to offer their wombs (we'd probably find out a lot about extra-genetic influences on development).
Morally speaking, if we *could* reproduce already proven exceptionally beneficial members of our species, might there not even be a positive argument for it?
Did anyone else read "reconstructed from the hair of their balls" ?
Mammoths were one of the many large mammal and bird species that went extinct coinciding with the global expansion of man. Even our ancestral cousins, the Neandertals, disappeared abruptly when Cro-Magnon man arrived on the scene. A wave of extinctions descended down through America at about the same time people arrived. The most likely conclusion is that one our Cro-Magnon predecessors learned how to hunt in groups, they tended to kill everything large almost everywhere they went.
A pet Wooly Mammoth might be a bit of a burden on the average urban dweller. Would there perhaps be a be a way to create a dwarf wooly mammoth? Maybe by cross-breeding it with a pot-bellied pig? Oh, and is there any way to give it more asses?
Why save your soul when you can sell it for a profit?
then we get pigmy pot bellied woolly mammoths! Apartment sized!
I for one fail to see anything trollish or off-topic in parent post. Am I new here?
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Well the placental mammals, like us and almost every other mammal, did not evolve until after the Asteroid event. They've been dominant for about 60 million years.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
I _know_ the classic theory about DNA being everything, and the proteins just regulating what gets transcribed. What I'm referring to is the recent article linked to even on Slashdot: "The Gene Is Having an Identity Crisis", where they claimed that it just isn't so. They claimed exactly what I wrote there: that the same gene can be transcribed in a dozen different ways, based on what those proteins say, and that half your heredity is actually in those proteins.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
me, i'm waiting for a mimmoth.
much easier to keep as a pet.
Non-placental mammals are mammals now. They were mammals then.
"Dinosaurs and mammals did not coexist." -- nope, sorry.
I know, I know. Hard to believe. I, too, had to go through the five stages of grief upon learning this.
Dyslexic or not this seems to be an interesting way to get the mammoth's DNA.
Heres something to wrap your head around
Put away all your criticisms until you finish reading this, and assume for just a minute that the 'bible' is right about something...
Adam and Eve were suggested to have lived for some 900 years or so, as well as many generations following (until Noah and the flood I believe).
ASSUMING this is true, for whatever reason that humans were living 13 times longer than they are today.... the same would probably be true for other 'animals'
True fact: a lizard NEVER stops growing throughout its life, until the day it dies
if lizards lived 13 times longer than they do today, they would in fact be 13 times larger..
The "Green Iguana" commonly lives to be 6ft long, weighs 20 pounds, and while 'walking' are about 12 inches tall
times this by 13..
the Green Iguana /or/ "Giant Green Iguana" could , back some 4,000 yeras ago, lived to be:
78feet long
260 Pounds
13 Feet Tall
==
dinosaur // begin criticism //
Do we really want to do this to a sentient and intelligent species?
For a start, the Neanderthal will be a circus freak for all his life. Whatever his other achievements or shortcomings would be, he'll still be that reconstructed Neanderthal. I doubt that he could have a normal job or relationship or interact normally with new people, without getting back to that aspect that he's the only Neanderthal in the world. Even assuming that all people he'll meet are nice and tactful, it's still that curiosity aspect. It sounds like a recipe for getting depressed later.
But the more realistic aspect is that most people just aren't that nice. There are plenty of people for which it's nearly impossible to say "black" without an "N", if you know what I mean, and for whom it's a human rights issue if you even ask them to be nice. Can you imagine what these guys would be like, to a different _species_.
I mean, whatever job he'll ever get, and for whatever personal skills or achievements, there'll _always_ be some idiot trying to make one of the following points:
- he only got it because he's a Neanderthal, or
- Earth for humans, you freaks don't belong here, or
- here's a long list of bullshit and fallacies as to why your kind is biologically too stupid for this job, and we don't want your kind around,
etc.
Can you imagine a Neanderthal going through high-school without a trauma, for that matter? High school "society" nowadays is based on _extreme_ conformism. (Even if, ironically, it usually means conforming to the image of being a non-conformist rebel.) To belong there, you must look like everyone else, listen to the same music as everyone else, say the same ideas and memes as everyone else, etc. Probably half the RIAA labels' income comes from teenagers who just have to buy the same albums as everyone else in their peer group, for example. And being different in any way, is a recipe for being at best ostracized and at worst bullied constantly. How do you think they'll behave towards our hypothetical reconstructed Neanderthal, which looks different from the rest, speaks very differently too (if recent research about their larynx and hearing system are right), maybe even has different aptitudes (Neanderthals never seem to have invented or used or made missile weapons, so maybe this guy will just not be wired to have any skill in any ball game), and possibly have the brain wired differently enough to think differently?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
f the post:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/business_intelligence/mining/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212100912&subSection=News
"If...you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning" - Catherine Aird
>Well the placental mammals, like us and almost every other mammal, did not evolve until after the Asteroid event.
Wrong. There were plenty of mammals in the Mesozoic. And according to the University of California Museum of Paleontology "Eutherians first became common in central Asia during the Upper Cretaceous." Eutherians being the technically correct name for placental mammals.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/mammal/eutheria/eutheriafr.html
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Sounds Deerishus.
Assuming you're right, and we can also do it without horrible animal suffering (like many unpleasant abortions as part of the cloning process), then someone find a billionaire to fund this!
I don't think it would be ethical to use a chimpanzee surrogate for a neanderthal, because I believe neanderthals are more closely related to humans than chimps.
Neanderthal clones would undermine religions. It's frightening how stupid the (religulous) U.S. is. Human stupidity needs to be confronted, and cloning can help.
Similar reasoning: Imagine if the U.S. had natural ape populations today. Would the religulous be retarding our civilisation and endangering us, as much as they do presently?
Would it be able to walk?
like picasso, the neanderthal
neanderthals didn't go extinct, they interbred. there's a little neanderthal in all of us
its not so bleak as you presume. as a unique person, he'll enjoy rockstar status. there's also asshats that pick on people in wheelchairs, but do you see stephen hawking genuinely limited by that in life? you are giving too much credence to the reaction of the lowest common denominator, which he wouldn't come in that much contact with, and wouldn't rule his life
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
... for a sabertooth cat. I want it to attack my neighbor.. er uh play with his cat...
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
You advocated an idea that fails to account for the fact the animal in question won't enjoy being hot glued to brown wigs very much, and is likely to smack and stump all over you for trying. Sorry dude, it's not going to work.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Actually, apparently there is exactly 0% Neanderthal in us, if you look at the DNA. You can see the differences between Neanderthals and the common ancestor (since that's what made them Neanderthals), and you can see the differences between humans and the common ancestor (since that's what makes us humans.) The two sets just don't overlap. All the genes that made Neanderthals be Neanderthals are not present in us.
The easiest to look at is the mitochondrial DNA, since it's pretty small, and it's been mapped to death for both species. We just don't have any humans which show the unique Neanderthal mutations there. So at least there was no _female_ neanderthal in anyone's ancestry.
Now I'd be surprised if they didn't at least try to have sex with each other, given that in some places they lived in the same cave for tens of thousands of years. I mean, so it was short and stout women with sloped foreheads. Some people would still try to screw one, if one was available. And viceversa.
The more probable explanation is that, like any other combination of different species, the offspring was either non-viable (if the species are not that related) or sterile (if they're closely related.) E.g., see mules, or either combination of lion and tiger.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
if lizards lived 13 times longer than they do today, they would in fact be 13 times larger..
Hi there,
Welcome to remedial math. You are here because you don't understand the relationship of volume, mass, and length very well.
If you have a 1x1x1" cube that weighs one pound, and it were to become 13x larger, would it really be a 13 lb cube 13x13x13" to a side?
If that were true, it is actually, by volume, 2197 times larger than it was before, and as a result its density has gone from 1 lb per cubic inch to 0.006 lb per cubic inch.
If you have 1x1" cube, and you make its volume 13x times larger, and as a bonus keep the density the same, how large would it be? Answer: 2.35x2.35x2.35" Not nearly as impressive.
By extension, an iguana that is 6ft long, that grows 13x as big by volume, would be maybe 15' ft long, and stand 28" tall. Again... not all that impressive.
And even all that assumes a constant growth rate, which of course, isn't the case. There is a big growth spurt at the beginning, and it slows down from there.
Can they breed it with a pig?
i always fancied i was half caveman
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
we discover mammoths have a taste for human flesh!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
if there is an extinct species of animal or plant that is essential for human health that we have been missing from our diet by over population. A mammoth or mastodon is the most likely suspect in the animal kingdom, so I can't wait to try a mammoth or mastodon burger, and see how I feel!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I, for one, welcome our new trollish or off-topic overlords.
?? Ok, then...
In Soviet Russia, trolls mod YOU!
-
.
- aqk
F U
Eutherians being the technically correct name for placental mammals.
Well, technically I don't think Eutheria and placental mammals is *exactly* synonymous. They have different criteria for inclusion, with placentals a subgrouping of Eutheria. It's just that there are no living non-placental eutherians.
Thanks, that is interesting to know. I already knew that marsupials technically have a placenta of sorts, but they are not considered placentals, and are definitely not Eutherians.
Anyway, I just wanted to make it clear what the quote was referring to.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water