I’d love to see “maybe they taste good” on grant proposal for funding. I guess that’ll put the fear of Science into all those price gouging tantorburger profiteers.
- Clone mammoth
- ???
- Profit!
Maybe we could do it another way. From what I understand (from my Science Channel watcher perspective), you could basically reverse engineer a species using modern species and changing a protean here or turn on/off a gene there and get something that looks remarkably like a woolly mammoth, or maybe even a dinosaur. For instance, I saw a show where they did just this and got a chicken with, say, teeth…or a tail. Or scales. I assume you could do the same with modern elephant stock to get, well, shaggy wool (and other mammoth features).
I suppose that, technically, it wouldn’t be a mammoth or a dinosaur, but it would sure look like one. Of course, it would probably take decades of trial and error and lots and lots of botched or transitional forms, but is there any reason why (assuming you wanted to spend the large amounts of money) you couldn’t do it this way?
-XT
Modern elephants are not descended from prehistoric mammoths or mastodons, so I don’t think you could “regress” an elephant into a mammoth. Modern elephants are tropical species and mammoths were a cousin line that had evolved separately over millions of years for high-latitude cllimates. I supposed you could try to turn an elephant into a pseudo-mammoth but it really wouldn’t be the same.
I always thought that elephants were more closely related. Does that mean there are no current animal descendents of the woolly mammoth? I suppose that means we’d be back to hoping for some viable DNA from one of the flash frozen carcasses.
-XT
I propose that we terraform Mars, populate it with extinct flaura and fauna, and see what happens. At minimum, it would confuse the hell out of people in the far future who reinvent society after near armageddon. (Uh, Bill, I think my Occam’s razor is broken).
Also, we eat a few.
Current elephants are not supposed to be descendants of mammoths, but mammoths have been moved further from mastodons and closer to elephants in recent charts. (My wife lately wrote a tragedy about the Parkman-Webster murder, and I spent some time helping her with the research.)
One thing about cloning, and elephant: as elephants are currently the closest non-extinct relative of mammoths, you’d have to use an elephant to gestate a mammoth clone. Nurse it, too. An elephant uterus might not support a mammoth fetus, but it’s the only chance you have. Also, I think (but don’t quote me) that Indian elephants are a little closer genetically, and domestic, so easier to work with, but African elephants are closer in size. I don’t know what the implications of that are, I just assume that there are some.
Anyway, one thing that you can’t fully clone, no matter what you are cloning, in mitochondrial DNA. Any time you clone, you have the host ovum, with the haploid nucleus you remove, and the donor cell, with the diploid nucleus that you transplant into the host ovum. Unless the host ovum, and the donor cell come from the same female (or relatives in a female line, like maternal siblings, mother and child), you eventual clone cell will not have the same mitochondrial DNA as the original. It will have the nucleus of the donor cell, but the mitochondrial DNA of the donor ovum.
Mitochondrial DNA doesn’t contribute to the appearance of an individual, so clones look alike in spite of different mtDNA, but mtDNA is responsible for cell nourishment. We don’t know that elephant mtDNA will allow mammoth cells to develop in utero just the way the would with the correct mtDNA. You could get a viable individual, but it wouldn’t be a mammoth in any real sense. It also wouldn’t really be an elephant-mammoth hybrid.
When we are trying to revive a recently deceased species, it’s different, because we know enough about the species to know whether the resultant creature is a true creature-X, or some sort of mutant, due to a unique gestational situation for that particular DNA sequence.
I am not against knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but there really is no way to know that what we would make in this case would be a mammoth, and not a monster. I hope that there would be smaller experiments, with cloning close genetic relatives using the nuclear DNA of one, and the ovum and uterus of another-- smaller species whose natural life is much shorter than an elephant’s, and what I presume a mammoth’s would be, so that results that produce, say, limbs similar to a human with phocomelia, or (and I really hope not) neurological problems that cause pain, could be euthanized without such a great loss, either in terms of life span, of investment.
Well, the scientific justification for trying to unextinctify mammoths would be to learn things about them that we don’t already know, but this method can mostly only tell us things we do already know. So that would be one major objection there.