Mammoths

But what's the point?

I'll be honest, I don't really see much point in keeping exotic animals in zoos to begin with; but resurrecting mammoths just to have something nifty to look at behind some bars really strikes me as a huge expenditure of resources for very little purpose.

edited 16th Mar '12 10:27:36 AM by Carciofus

Sometimes you just cant resist the urge to do awesome but impractical things.

Or it could be just because people pay through the nose to see awesome shit. And they know it.

edited 16th Mar '12 11:04:52 AM by LatverianBadger

Yyyeah, but here we are not talking about a polar bear cub. We are talking about a beast about whose characteristics nobody really has that much of a clue, and which would require ludicrous investments to be resurrected, and which would be likely to have health trouble (cloning is still rather iffy from that point of view, even disregarding the fact that it would be gestated in a less-than-optimal environment).

If it is For Science!, well, that's easily reason enough; but if it is in order to have "awesome shit" to show off, well...

It completely depends on who's doing the cloning. If it's run by a corporation, then definitely for the awesomeness. If it's done by scietnists in an academic lab, it'll be to learn something new. Not that a Mammoth gestated in a modern elephant will really be a mammoth, of course. It'll be a hybrid at best, dead at worst. Might even kill the elephant.

Agreed.

Perhaps — if that can be done, about which I am skeptical right now — the second generation of "resurrected mammoths" might be somewhat close to the original, what with being gestated into another quasi-mammoth. But that adds yet another level of difficulty: under which conditions did mammoths even reproduce?

If the experiment succeeds, cool. But I'm not holding my breath.

It won't fully succeed, and it shouldn't either way. The animals were adapted to a different environment, and the only way we could get a true Mammoth would be to recreate that environment.

I think if they successively (Read, in succession, not successfully) cloned the Mammoths several times, using each generation to gestate the next, they MIGHT get somewhere in however long it takes. They still wouldn't get a 100% Mammoth, but they'd get better than the possibly up to 50% elephant the first generation would be.

Well, the boundary within species is always fuzzy. But I think — not that I have any expertise, it's just a vague impression — that the second generation ones might be close enough to the original to qualify as somewhat sickly and malformed mammoths. Perhaps.

edited 16th Mar '12 11:47:24 AM by Carciofus

That's still not good enough if we're talking about learning a lot about them. They'd still have enough elephant to fuzz things up.

We'd need third generation or further.

Is there much material difference between "Woolly Mammoth" and "Hairy Elephant"?

Mammoths were larger than the largest elephants of today.

-Lets that sink in.- They also apparently had anti-freeze in their blood. There are a lot of differences between Mammoths and Elephants.

I dunno. Is there much material difference between "human" and "hairless orangutan"?

From the point of view of scientific classification, the difference between elephants and mammoths seems to be more or less the same as the one between humans and orangutans: in both cases, they belong to the same family, but not to the same genus.

What this experiment is trying to do is really like taking an aged sample of orangutan tissue, turn it into a viable embryo, then implant it into a human female and seeing if it grows. Stranger things have succeeded; but not much stranger.

edited 16th Mar '12 11:52:28 AM by Carciofus

That is, even assuming them scientists can produce a gene pool big enough for the mammoth-hybrid to actually thrive. Otherwise everyone will have to order their mammoth clones freshly cloned.

Re-created mammoths wouldn't need a special habitat created for them. They only died out several thousand years ago; it's not like they're dinosaurs or whatever. Odds are good that nearly every plant they ever ate is still available, and the cold steppes of Eurasia haven't changed very much: they just moved a bit farther north, that's all.