A few years ago, a japanese scientist was going to try to bring back the wooley mammoths-by cloning! Did he succeed?
How about the long-extinct Tasmanian Wolf? Are we likely to see revivals of extinct animals, now that cloning technology has improved?
Damn, I’d love to have a pet DODO BIRD!
[hijack]this thread startled me … the crippled and almost defunct car of my daughter’s b/f is nicknamed “the wooly mammoth”… for a minute there I thought it was returning … AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh[/hijack]
Re the Tasmanian Tiger: There was a suggestion that it could be cloned but it caused an enormous shit-storm along the lines of “We’d be better off spending the money on other things eg not making other species extinct”
There is another Japanese scientist, Akiri Iritani, whose odd mission is not to clone the WM but to breed one by finding viable motile sperm in the frozen sac of a preserved WM. He would use it to impregnate an elephant [the African and the Indian elephants are both more closely related to the WM than they are to each other], then impregnate the daughter with the father’s sperm again, etc. etc., until ultimately the result is a very inbred but almost pure Wooly Mammoth.
He’s completely nuts, but he’s raised quite a lot of money to help him. He is correct in his belief that DNA is too unravelled to clone when it’s been dead that long, but to date the oldest motile sperm ever discovered was in a bull that had been dead and artificially frozen for less than a decade.
Cecil did a column on this, complete with a classic interpretation of a mammoth by Slug, but it doesn’t seem to have made it into the archives as yet.
Wow, he’d have ears the size of Prince Charles’.
There was a new special over the summer on Discovery on this topic, ralph124c. You might want to watch it when it re-airs(it may be on DVD/VHS at Discovery Stores as well). Unfortunately while I know that your question was addressed in detail, I can’t recall if they were discussing how they had actually created a “woolly Mammoth” or if they were talking how they will create one. Sorry.
Cecil briefly mentioned cloning mammoths in the recently re-run classic column What color were dinosaurs? That sparked a long-running thread in the Comments on Cecil’s Columns forum: Why isn’t the cloning of a mammoth likely?