My Sweet Escape

danger-in-design:

aimmyarrowshigh:

thatdarkknight:discoverynews:

Woolly Mammoth to be Cloned

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.

BRING BACK ALL THE MAMMALS!

But mammoths were about twice the size of modern elephants.  What animal is big enough to gestate these embryos?  I am ALL ABOUT cloning mammoths because I think they are super awesome and would potentially become my favorite living animal (besides jellyfish).

But I am afraid for the elephants’ birth canals, yo.  Mammoths are HUGE.  Elephants are just huge.

Isn’t this like…scientist experiments with extinct things and they successfully bring them back, but then things go awry and BAM! End of the world as we know it.

Okay, maybe that was a little far fetch. Mammoths would be cool.