Mammoths

They're coming back.

There are...no words.

Best comeback since Lazarus!

I am skeptical. As the article said, one of the main scientists involved is a rather controversial character who has faked research in the past.

I know that a similar attempt to resurrect the Pyrenean Ibex (of whom we have fresher specimen, and which has closer living relatives to use as incubators) ended up with the clone dying soon after its birth out of lung defects; and it seems to me — but I could be wrong, I am no expert at all — that succeeding in cloning a mammoth is many orders of magnitude more difficult.

But we will see. More research and experimentation certainly cannot hurt.

EDIT: This is a more cautious article on the same topic.

edited 15th Mar '12 9:32:53 AM by Carciofus

So it sounds as though the general idea is in itself sound, but it just needs a bit of tweaking for individual issues.

edited 15th Mar '12 9:15:06 AM by TheBatPencil

Yes, the idea is sound. But the technology and the biology around it are not entirely understood yet. In principle, there is no reason for thinking this impossible: but it is not clear whether, at the moment, such a project has a nonzero success probability.

As I said, I am a complete layman on the topic; but what I find worrying is that mammoth and elephants are not close relatives. They belong to the same family (Elephantidae), but not to the same genus, so they are about as much related as humans are with orangutans.

What is the probability that gestating a fertilized human egg into an orangutan, or a fertilized orangutan egg into a human, would lead to a successful birth? And that, even supposing that this happens, the different intrauterine environments would not cause massive malformations in the fetus?

I have no idea, myself. But perhaps something like this would have better chances of success if we could control the environment of the embryo to a high level of precision, for example through an artificial uterus.

edited 15th Mar '12 9:25:13 AM by Carciofus

If it means they'll be able to serve them in restaurants, I'm all for it.

Pleistocene Park.

One animal.

Does this mean we may soon have a babby mammoth?

edited 15th Mar '12 9:35:56 AM by RTaco

I give them 20 years before they're extinct again.

That'd be the shortest comeback in history.

We should freeze human tissue and store it, together with our DNA code (ideally for many different specimen, more than enough for a breeding population) and plenty of medical information, in some remote and hopefully-untouched vault.

Might make things easier for whatever intelligent species which comes after us to resurrect us.

Could become some sort of gentleman's agreement between intelligent species: give us the means to, and we will resurrect you as soon as we can, and you'll do the same if we get extinct later...

Wild Mass Guessing: We know that elephants are pretty bright, as far as animals go. What if mammoths were actually sapient?

edited 15th Mar '12 9:53:07 AM by Carciofus

Then they engaged in, and lost, a genocidal war with our great grandparents.

If they did not want to get stabbed, they should not have wrapped delicious steaks around themselves.

edited 15th Mar '12 10:01:23 AM by Carciofus

In our ancestor's defense, it was really cold back then...and the Mammoths were hogging all of that fur.

did jurassic park teach us nothing?

That cloning raptors is all right, but inducing gigantism in them might be a somewhat stupid idea?

edited 15th Mar '12 10:20:17 AM by Carciofus

Samuel L. Jackson is badass even when he's a computer nerd?

Oh, and if we're gonna have mammoths again, won't we need giants to herd them?

Also we learned that Newman fucks up everything.

And dragons.

Don't forget the dragons.

edited 15th Mar '12 12:01:54 PM by Ekuran

This is when a time-traveling Atlantean Neanderthal appears to warn us "Stop, you fools!"

Neeewman.

So, how long until some enterprising person sets up mammoth riding sessions for lucrative amounts of cash?

Ugg boots may get some competition too.

I know they've arguably brought back the quagga zebra (an extinct subspecies of plains zebra) already.

I say "arguably" because there's some debate as to whether or not their resulting zebras—despite apparently having the rather distinctive stripe pattern of the extinct subspecies—count, what with having the blood of other plains zebra subspecies as well.

edited 15th Mar '12 6:43:35 PM by FarseerLolotea

I'm intrigued as to whether this will actually work.