Japanese Researchers Announce Plan to Resurrect Woolly Mammoth Within Five Years

I can't wait for this to happen. Maybe we actually will figure out how to clone dinosaurs in my lifetime.

Wow, then we can go back to using them for car washing, floor vacuuming (just the little ones, you have to tie them to a wooden skate) and my favorite, RIBS! (Slurp Slurp, watch out, they're heavy!!)

This would not give us a rebirth of the species - merely a single specimin of a single mammoth species. Interesting for pure science, but you won't see them reintroduced to the Russia steppe anytime soon.

To come to any solid conclusions about mammoth life, you would need to do much more than a single specimin. You would have to clone out a sufficient number of the same species to have a genetically varied pool from which natural offspring could be formed. Second, you would have to have reintroduction to create natural behavior. Finally, you would have to have generations of natural integration for learned behaviors to be reintroducted to the species naturally.

Why the idea of undoing the permanancy of extinction is a powerful lure - and the mammoth pushes both the limits of the technology and the imagination - the simple truth is that once a species has gone extinct, you might as well wave goodbye forever - because if the will and resources existed to undo extinction, then they would have been there a thousand times over to prevent it.

finaly

@Oakspar77777: "...if the will and resources existed to undo extinction, then they would have been there a thousand times over to prevent it." Not true. The resources (specifically the technology) didn't exist when the extinction happened. Now they do, but it's too late to prevent something that's already passed. So we try to reverse it.

You are right, though, that this wouldn't allow for any practical applications in the long run, but it would provide a bit more insight into mammoth life from a biological perspective. Plus, the cool factor of "Humans Reverse Extinction And The Mammoth Is Reborn" can't be ignored :P .

At the very least, this is one of those "do it just to say we did" projects.

-IMP ;) :)

Lets clone Hitler so we can practice demolition on live subjects. Few would object!

if they can bring it back then they sure as heck better get me a T-rex

If the cloned mammoth was reared by elephants, it wouldn't be too disfunctional.
True, cloning just one individual doesn't equal reviving the species, but it is an excelent start.

Unnfortunately, this technique won't apply to most extinct animals. We have frozen mammoths, whose DNA isn't too badly denatured. But very few extinct species have been preserved this well. What this highlights is that we need to store samples of DNA of all endangered species.

dinosaurs can't be resurrected like the mammoths, because there is no actual tissue, hence no cells, so, no cloning.

Or at least sequence their respective geonomes so that even if the genetic material is lost, the protein sequences can be rebuilt artificially. I'm sure that with all the advancements that we have seen in the past 10 years, especially those involving creating artificial proteins, we will soon be able to remanufacture organisms like we do classic cars. LOL. The wave of the future.

@gizmowiz Hitlers body was burned.

My point was to go beyond mammoths. True, mammoths dies before there was a conservation option - so bringing them back, if they were so desired, would be the only way.

For other mammals, however, the difference in cost between conservation and ressurrection is huge (Amur Leopards, Giant Pandas, etc). The point being that for living species, it is far cheaper to sustain by natural processess than to try and ressurrect extict species.

It then does seem logical, however, to point out the unlikelyhood of anyone attempting to ressurrect the mammoth permanately - due to the cost involved and how little funding goes to the preservation of any large at-risk mammal.

gizmowiz lets first start from you.

Can the mastodon be far behind? They went extinct even more recently than the Mammoth (estimated to be 8000 years ago versus 14,000 years ago). If these estimates are accurate then DNA for the Mastodon could in theory be in even better condition than that of Mammoths. But Mammoths would be more cool as they were bigger beasts (Mastodons are in between Mammoths and modern Elephants and due to this may make a better selection for implanting embryos in elephants!). Just a thought from a DNA dummy.

One concern is that once we have this technology, we may start taking even less care of endangered species than we do now. As we can always clone them after they are extinct.

I just wanted to say that some dinosaur cells may have survived according to recent finding published in Scientific American.

Just imagine a few millennium down the line that aliens try to resurrect humans who went extinct via the same way. Oh what a mistake that would be.

I think this tech might come in handy when they hunt whales to extinction... They can just go "what?" and quickly resurrect them!

Any thoughts on cloning $$ MONEY $$ ?

Hoping for dinosaurs to be cloned in your lifetime is quite a hope. It's also something I hope doesn't happen. Any which way you look at it. It's easier for humanity as a species to have less predators capable of putting us lower on the food chain.

Unless, of course, you want them to exist for the sole purpose of developing better technology with which to kill larger animals for sport, in which case, I'll agree.

Other than that, I'm willing to suggest a suitable rule of thumb for bringing back species that are extinct: "Don't bring back from extinction a species with which you do not have the capability to put back into extinction."

in Africa and Asia where elephants faced the combined ability of the whole human race they didn't go extinct--which really raises question if a few wanderers who made it to North America, and Northern Europe and Asia managed to accomplish what their vastly superior left behind relatives in Southern Asia and Africa couldn't--indeed until very recent--like guns recent, Elephants were doing just fine--One of the big four or five--the Musk Ox--didn't go extinct. That it happened as the Ice Age ended would point to climate--but the Ice Age had come and gone several times previously with no harm.

One might also note that while European Beavers nearly went extinct in the Middle Ages--probably three or four hundred years elapsed without a single dam being built, when the chaos of WW I happened, nobody had time to mess with beavers--and, left alone, they started right on building dams, as if a hundred generations without a dam had never happened.