Wanna go hunting? Woolly Mammoth to Be Cloned
Within five years, a woolly mammoth will likely be cloned, according
to scientists who have just recovered well-preserved bone marrow in a mammoth thigh bone. Japan's Kyodo News first reported the find. You can see photos of the thigh bone at this Kyodo page. Russian scientist Semyon Grigoriev, acting director of the Sakha Republic's mammoth museum, and colleagues are now analyzing the marrow, which they extracted from the mammoth's femur, found in Siberian permafrost soil.
to scientists who have just recovered well-preserved bone marrow in a mammoth thigh bone. Japan's Kyodo News first reported the find. You can see photos of the thigh bone at this Kyodo page. Russian scientist Semyon Grigoriev, acting director of the Sakha Republic's mammoth museum, and colleagues are now analyzing the marrow, which they extracted from the mammoth's femur, found in Siberian permafrost soil.
NEWS: All About the Ice Age
Grigoriev and his team, along with colleagues from
Japan's Kinki
University, have announced that they will launch a joint
research project next year aimed at re-creating the enormous mammal, which went
extinct around 10,000 years ago.
DNEWS VIDEO:
Cool Jobs: Learn about the exciting life of a fossil hunter.
Mammoths used to be a
common sight on the landscape of North America and Eurasia. One of my favorite
papers of recent months concerned the earliest-known depiction of an animal
from the Americas. It was a mammoth engraved on a mammoth bone. Many of our
distant ancestors probably had regular face-to-face encounters with the
elephant-like giants.
The key to cloning the woolly mammoth is to replace the nuclei of egg
cells from an elephant with those extracted from the mammoth's bone marrow
cells. Doing this, according to the researchers, can result in embryos with
mammoth DNA. That's actually been known for a while.
NEWS: Prehistoric Dog Found With Mammoth Bone in
Mouth
What's been missing
is woolly mammoth nuclei with undamaged genes. Scientists have been on a Holy Grail-type search for such pristine nuclei
since the late 1990s. Now it sounds like the missing genes may have been
found.
In an odd twist, global warming may be responsible for the
breakthrough.
Warmer temperatures tied to global warming have thawed ground in
eastern Russia that is almost always permanently frozen. As a result,
researchers have found a fair number of well-preserved frozen mammoths there,
including the one that yielded the bone marrow.
Is it such a good
idea, however, to clone animals that have long been extinct? For a while
there's been some discussion of a real-life Jurassic Park setup containing such
animals. Introducing these beasts into existing ecosystems could be like
bringing in a potentially invasive species that would try to fill some space
presently held by other animal(s). Even if the cloned animals were contained in
special parks, there could still be a risk of spreading.
So if the woolly mammoth is successfully cloned sooner rather than
later, we'd probably be left with more questions and controversy than answers,
at least in the short term.
Grigoriev and his team, along with colleagues from
Japan's Kinki
University, have announced that they will launch a joint
research project next year aimed at re-creating the enormous mammal, which went
extinct around 10,000 years ago.
DNEWS VIDEO:
Cool Jobs: Learn about the exciting life of a fossil hunter.
Mammoths used to be a
common sight on the landscape of North America and Eurasia. One of my favorite
papers of recent months concerned the earliest-known depiction of an animal
from the Americas. It was a mammoth engraved on a mammoth bone. Many of our
distant ancestors probably had regular face-to-face encounters with the
elephant-like giants.
The key to cloning the woolly mammoth is to replace the nuclei of egg
cells from an elephant with those extracted from the mammoth's bone marrow
cells. Doing this, according to the researchers, can result in embryos with
mammoth DNA. That's actually been known for a while.
NEWS: Prehistoric Dog Found With Mammoth Bone in
Mouth
What's been missing
is woolly mammoth nuclei with undamaged genes. Scientists have been on a Holy Grail-type search for such pristine nuclei
since the late 1990s. Now it sounds like the missing genes may have been
found.
In an odd twist, global warming may be responsible for the
breakthrough.
Warmer temperatures tied to global warming have thawed ground in
eastern Russia that is almost always permanently frozen. As a result,
researchers have found a fair number of well-preserved frozen mammoths there,
including the one that yielded the bone marrow.
Is it such a good
idea, however, to clone animals that have long been extinct? For a while
there's been some discussion of a real-life Jurassic Park setup containing such
animals. Introducing these beasts into existing ecosystems could be like
bringing in a potentially invasive species that would try to fill some space
presently held by other animal(s). Even if the cloned animals were contained in
special parks, there could still be a risk of spreading.
So if the woolly mammoth is successfully cloned sooner rather than
later, we'd probably be left with more questions and controversy than answers,
at least in the short term.