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Extinct Mammoth, Coming To a Zoo Near You
Techmeology writes "Professor Akira Iritani of Kyoto University plans to use recent developments in cloning technology to give life to the currently extinct woolly mammoth. Although earlier efforts in the 1990s were unsuccessful due to damage caused by extreme cold, Professor Iritani believes he can use a technique pioneered by Dr Wakayama (who successfully cloned a frozen mouse) to overcome this obstacle. This technique will enable Professor Iritani to identify viable cell nuclei, and transfer them to egg cells of an African elephant which will carry the mammoth for a 600 day pregnancy."
I recall the time they found those fossilized mosquitoes and before long they
were cloning DNA
Now I'm being chased by some irate velociraptors
Well believe me...This has been one lousy day
Jurassic Park is frightening in the dark
All the dinosaurs are running wild
Someone shut the fence off in the rain
I admit it's kind of eerie
But this proves my chaos theory
And I don't think I'll be coming back again
Oh no
I cannot approve of this attraction
'Cause getting disemboweled always makes me kind of mad
A huge Tyrannosaurus ate our lawyer
Well I suppose that proves...they're really not all bad
Jurassic Park is frightening in the dark
All the dinosaurs are running wild
Someone let T. Rex out of his pen
I'm afraid those things will harm me
'Cause they sure don't act like Barney
And they think that I'm they're dinner not their friend
Oh no
Jurassic Park is frightening in the dark
All the dinosaurs are running wild
What a crummy weekend this has been
Well this sure ain't no E-ticket
Think I'll tell 'em where to stick it
'Cause I'm never coming back this way again
Oh no...Oh no
Fuck that, I can't wait until one of these things goes nuts and starts goring the fuck out of everything.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
I can't. I don't even know what wine goes with elephant, let alone what wine goes with mammoth.
A warning. Like refer madness was a warning.
lighten up and have a drink
I shall have a 3,400-year-old Mesoamerican beer.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
Excellent. I could use a baby mammoth to help with the dishes.
Meh.
We wiped them out once, we can do it again. If you're descended from genes too slow to outrun and outwit a woolly mammoth, how the fuck did you get here in the first place?
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Eh...It's a living.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
If this was an insect or small animal that might escape and breed you could have a point, but we're talking about a MAMMOTH. I seriously doubt they're going to manage to sneak off and start breeding in the wild without anybody noticing.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
think of all the damage kudzoo is doing in habitats where it is non-native.
The mammoths will eat all the kudzu.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
If my theory is right and there is an ingredient in Mammoth meat that makes our species sane!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Some specimens were preserved well enough for people to try to take a bite. Most accounts of this are dubious at best but a few more credible accounts of having eaten mammoth flesh described it as being quite nasty. This is to be expected of a carcass that has been sitting frozen and half rotten in the Arctic since the last ice age. Now supposing that we found a few cell nuclei that looked good, the most likely outcome would be several hundred failed attempts if prior cloning experience is any indication. Genetic damage could in principle be corrected to a degree by hybridizing the broken strands with a very closely related species (in the case of dinosaurs it would be bird DNA; Ostriches to be specific, not frogs as was suggested in the Jurassic Park movies)
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Naw, she's too busy running for President and taping her reality show.
This is a little different than insects or plants which invade non-native habitats. Insects, plants, small mammals, etc. all reproduce quickly, and can evade humans easily because of their small size. A few seeds fly around and suddenly there's an epidemic of kudzu, for instance.
Mammoths are very, very large, as should be obvious by their name. They're not going to sneak aboard a cargo ship without being noticed, and then go hide in the wild somewhere and reproduce like rabbits. If anything, they probably have an even longer gestation time than elephants, which already have a ridiculously long gestation time (which is part of why they're going extinct; they can't reproduce fast enough to make up for human predation, even though it's been massively reduced in recent decades).
I think the dangers here are non-existent. Elephants already have a very hard time in the wild; these things aren't going to get out and take over. Even if a couple of mammoths did manage to escape somehow (that'd be a massive security oversight wouldn't it?), it would be easy to find and recapture them within the 2 years or whatever it takes them to make a single baby mammoth. It'd be pretty hard to not notice a woolly mammoth running loose anywhere near humans. These animals are just going to be a curiosity, probably confined to zoos, and I think it's great that it might really happen.
The danger is if this same technology is used to "resurrect" other, much smaller extinct species. What would happen, for instance, if they brought back some prehistoric insects that were alive when the dinosaurs were around? That really could have problems like what you're talking about, because insects (even large ones) grow and reproduce very, very quickly, but are small enough to escape human confinement pretty easily, and then be very hard to track down and exterminate once in the wild.
Or what if they brought back the passenger pigeon, or the dodo bird?
Hide him in a library.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Do you think they'll have nut obsessed rodents?
As much as squirrels and others love nuts, I think some crows in Japan deserve credit for doing something different with nuts. NHK (via Mhz WorldView) reports that birds have learned not only to drop nuts in the roadway where cars break them open, but to do it at intersections where the traffic gets stopped so they can pick up the pieces.
PBS also reported it:
http://www.pbs.org/lifeofbirds/brain/index.html
Its okay. If elephants get wiped out we can wait a few centuries and then implant elephant embryos into mammoth's so they can get their revenge.
A mammoth on a slippery slope would be very amusing to watch! Let's do it!
What bacteria will come from this animal that haven't been around since they are extinct?
Dude, the spontaneous creation theory for life went out of fashion around the time of Pasteur. The only bacteria this mammoth will possess are ones that are present in our world today. While the mammoth's own micro-environment will no doubt favor the growth of certain specific bacteria as part of its normal flora, it will be no more dangerous than turtles and chickens which carry Salmonella sp (responsible for typhoid, amongst other things), or armadillos which carry Yersenia pestis (responsible for bubonic plague aka black death).
While having your back scratched regularly by an armadillo is not a good idea, the presence of the pathogen in the environment does not automatically mean epidemics. There are a couple cases of bubonic plague even in US every year, FYI.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.