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43,000-Year-Old Woolly Mammoth Remains Offer Strong Chance of Cloning
EwanPalmer sends a followup to a story from last year about a team of Siberian scientists who recovered an ancient wooly mammoth carcass. It was originally believed to be about 10,000 years old, but subsequent tests showed the animal died over 43,000 years ago. The scientists have been surprised by how well preserved the soft tissues were. They say it's in better shape than a human body buried for six months. "The tissue cut clearly shows blood vessels with strong walls. Inside the vessels there is haemolysed blood, where for the first time we have found erythrocytes. Muscle and adipose tissues are well preserved." The mammoth's intestines contain vegetation from its last meal, and they have the liver as well. The scientists are optimistic that they'll be able to find high quality DNA from the mammoth, and perhaps even living cells. They now say there's a "high chance" that data would allow them to clone the mammoth.
For mammoth burgers.
I'll prepare the mountable lasers!
I suppose the idea of cloning a 43,000-year-old mammoth would be the kind of thing that would attract funding, but from a purely scientific standpoint, wouldn't you start out small and try to clone, say, a dead chicken first, just to see if the process actually worked?
Proverbs 21:19
Free-range grass fed mammoth might still taste like elephant, so don't get your hopes up.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Haven't you ever heard the song by "Loverboy?" Mammoth and Elephant DNA just won't splice.
A few thousand years isn't "long".
Compared to the other changes humans wreak over decades, bringing back mammoths would barely cause a ripple.
"Contain these creatures forever and ever"? We already extinguished them once, without even the help of gunpowder. If you're looking for things to worry about, you can do much better than this.
I predict that the cloned animal will be possessed by either the Devil or some other evil spirit.
Hot pan, salt, pepper, enquiring minds want to know.
[FUCK BETA]
AFAIK frozen mammoth meat HAS been eaten before by sled dogs, if not people. One thing going for this is the close relatives still living for the surrogate mother. I guess the down side is daddy elephant is going to take one look at the baby and bith-slap mommy until she runs away to join the circus.
Off topic, but if you're into making stuff like I am... the only legal way to get ivory anymore (besides an insane permitting process) is tusks dug up from mammoths in the arctic. I suspect that if they start re-introducing them to the wild, that will become illegal to... which would be super lame. Also, the ivory found in bogs and such usually absorb minerals and stuff making it very unique looking.
Sure. Woolly mammoths are pretty big. One might even call them mammoth. If one gets out, it won't be that hard to find.
Besides, we shouldn't be talking about creating a population of these things yet. Lets create one and see how that goes. It's not like it's going to run off into the forest and sprout more.
We can't keep elephants and rhinos alive, so let's clone us some mammoths...
Well, obviously the melt of the ice age and all the the global warming problems since then were started off by Woolly Mammoth farts and now they want to bring them back?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Mammoth fur - ugh... Imagine saber tooth tiger hail balls...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
They need to clone dwarf mammoths and sell them as house pets.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
It's not like it's going to run off into the forest and sprout more.
I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way.
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."
-- Dr. Ian Malcolm
My understanding is that mammoths are fairly conspicuous creatures, what with them being giant hairy elephants.
30 year ago, you never know :)
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/...
What does your mom have to do with this?
Will we be able to ask it questions about life 40,000 years ago? This is very exciting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I don't know how this got modded insightful. Are you implying that we shouldn't be doing the latter because of the former? Because, pardon my French, but that's fucking retarded. These two things are so unrelated that it's hard to even come up with a decent car analogy, but I'll try. What you're suggesting is something along the lines of "we can't keep people from crashing their cars, do we really think it's a good idea to build space ships?" It's just absurd.
Other than the coolness factor, what is the point to cloning an animal that nature made extinct? Is Siberia really incomplete without pachyderms?
I'm equally interested in cloning its last meal.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
We could save the elephants. Mamoth ivory will make regular one completelly lame and so 20th century.
shh don't talk about the hairy elephant in the room
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I mean, just look at the devastation non-native species are causing in various nations. They certify they can contain these creatures forever and ever?
Notice that it's small animals being invasive while the megafauna are often endangered even on their home ground?
Megafauna move slowly, breed very slowly and are easy to spot. So it's pretty easy to hunt and kill them at a rate much faster than they can breed.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
"The scientists are optimistic that they'll be able to find high quality DNA from the mammoth, and perhaps even living cells." Is this a real possibility; 43,000 living eukaryote cells? It seems like cellular respiration would have ceased long ago, or is the claim that they were somehow preserved in some kind of stasis?
Giant hairy elephants, or just hairy elephants?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
but I would imagine you try an elephant first, and then a more recently frozen elephant, and go from there...
Living cells - no way. Even if frozen for a few seconds cell die. That's what 'frostbite' is, then your fingers/toes/nose turn black and falloff... And saying it's better preserved than something buried for 6 months! Wow - things rot in my fridge in days.
That's why we need to fit out lasers to them.
Look, there is probably nothing that could help a small population of megafauna survive better than than equipping them with lasers.
Just 'sayin.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
lets hope it would be easier to find than a 777
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
We lost a 770 airplane loaded with passengers.
i give the mammoth 50/50 odds of escaping and finding a new home in india with a couple of young lady elephants, who are looking for a big hairy man.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I can't wait for Mammoth wool for next winter, or the spring's fresh and cool nights.
Mammoths don't travel at 500+ mph. Planes don't leave footprints or take great, big dumps on the ground to announce where they've been. Now, if they create a mammoth that can travel at 500 mph across water, I concede that yes, we may lose track of it.
That was the one that got away from me as a kid, herding them, and I was punished for loosing her. They belonged to us, and so any offspring are *mine*.
And you kids these days, think spring is bad when the dogs and cats start shedding, we needed *rakes* when out mammoths started shedding....
mark "and my folks still had the bones of the dinosaurs they helped get rid of...."
Best make them lysine dependent and all female, just in case.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
No supervillain named 'Madam' would be pretty enough for today's comic readers. A 'Madam' doesn't have huge yet perky breasts or a tight bottom that she can bend to point at the reader while also looking the same way.
At most, we'd get something like 'Mammatha', or maybe a 'Mammoth Girl'.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
The fact that they have the liver and last meal are very promising. It seems likely that the flora of a mammoth's gut were different from those in a modern-day African elephant's. We are all super-organisms, you know, and an inoculation with a little of its own poop in infancy could set up the appropriate flora. The researchers can also figure out what exactly the mammoth liked to eat.
More problematic, I imagine, is mitochondria, etc. Cross-species cloning puts DNA from one beast into the cells (factories) of another beast. Such a transfer might yield incompatible sub-cellular systems. Mitochondria are RNA-based, and pass from the mother's oocyte. I have no idea whether any mammoth-mitochondria or other non-DNA-based organelles from the sample might still be viable.
Very interesting project in any case.
First off, no one has ever cloned an actual living elephant. Horses have been cloned by implanting a cell nucleus from a living cell in a host egg cell and then implanting that in a surrogate mother. That process results in about 1 viable embryo for every 1,000 attempts so it is hardly a sure thing. In TFA however, they are talking about taking a nucleus from a 43,000-year-old frozen cell and implanting that in an egg cell of another species and then implanting the hoped for embryo into a living elephant. There are not that many elephants to try this on worldwide, most of those are in zoos, and even normal reproduction of these elephants is problematic with the population plummeting due to a lack of fertility. The bottom line is, don't expect to see the wooly mammoth at your local petting zoo anytime soon.
Seems to me that they should be finding plenty of mamoth in greenland and north america. Perhaps we are not looking as much as we should.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Based on my extensive observation of mammoths, I'm pretty sure they do travel at 500+ mph...
I've never seen one that couldn't break 525mph when it really got going.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I mean, just look at the devastation non-native species are causing in various nations. They certify they can contain these creatures forever and ever?
There's no shortage of big bore rifles on the market today. Containment isn't an issue.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
A mammoth is much smaller than the missing Boeing 777.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
There are lots of "snowflake babies" in need of adoption: http://www.washingtontimes.com...
If you have fertility issues, consider adopting one, so he or she can get out of the freezer and start living, like Hannah Strege did!
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Could such animals possible be healthy in the absence of the gut flora & other micro-species that evolved along with it?
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