File :-(, x, )
Baby mammoth discovered in Siberia Anonymous
ITS tail is lopsided. Close up, it looks suspiciously like a small, and unremarkable, Asian elephant. But scientists were this week hailing the sensational discovery of a perfectly preserved baby woolly mammoth, which died around 10,000 years ago, and was found in the frozen tundra of northern Russia.

A reindeer herder stumbled across the carcass of the six-month-old female calf in May in a virtually inaccessible part of north-western Siberia.

"The mammoth has no defects except that its tail was a bit off," Alexei Tikhonov, one of a group of international experts who examined the mammoth last week in the Arctic town of Salekhard, told BBC Online.

Extinct woolly mammoths have turned up in Siberia for centuries. But it is unusual for a complete example to be recovered. The last major find was in 1997 when a family in the neighbouring Taymyr Peninsula came across a tusk attached to what turned out to be a 20,380-year-old mammoth carcass.

The latest 130-centimetre tall, 50-kilogram Siberian specimen appears to have died just as the species was heading for extinction during the last ice age.

It is being sent to Japan for further tests.

Global warming has made it easier for woolly mammoth hunters to hack the animal out of Russia's thawing permafrost. Many examples are simply sold on the black market — and can be seen in Russian souvenir shops, next to unhappy-looking stuffed brown bears.
>> Anonymous
That's just great. If there's a perfectly preserved mammoth out there that could be used to clone living ones, it's probably going to be ruined and sold to a souvenir by some greedy black market operator for profit. I hate people sometimes. >:(
>> Anonymous
you need a lot more than just a perfectly preserved specimen for cloning. you'd have to find fully intact sperm and ova... good fucking look...
>> Anonymous
Welcome to economics.
>> Anonymous
>>118655
Not really. That used to be the case, but genetic technology has advanced since. Now what you really need is enough cells retaining intact DNA so that you can put it back together and figure out the differences between mammoths and Indian elephants. Then you engineer the changes to an Indian elephant, and voila, mammoth.
>> Anonymous
Oops! Your newly cloned mammoth doesn't eat any existing vegetation. It starves in 1 week.
>> Anonymous
>>118661

I'm sure it could last a little bit longer than that.
>> Anonymous
>>118653
>>118666

Unlike most other species today, these things went extinct for a reason you know.
>> Anonymous
>>118661

You sure about that? Has the vegetation really changed so drastically in the past 12.000 years?

>>118668

What exactly was the reason mammoths became extinct? Climate changes?
>> Anonymous
But still...

Wouldn't it be wonderful to look at a living prehistoric species? (LOL CROCODILES) It looks exactly like a typical baby elephant. It could SO work if they do it right.

Maybe extract a fossilized overy from the baby (provided that it's a girl)and just fuck with it to make more.

Maybe with that, we can resurrect other extinct species too! Full-scale jurassic park, bitches!
>> Anonymous
To quote a great movie:
"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. "
>> Anonymous
>>118697
i remember seeing an article on some japanese scientist who was looking for frozen sperm and ova from preserved mammoths. he was able to extract some but hadn't found any that were viable yet.
>> Anonymous
>>118668
Yes, a reason known as Homo sapiens.
>> Anonymous
>>118734

no

"Many mammoth experts reject this theory. Ross McPhee of the American Museum of Natural History is one. "The hard part of the argument was to believe that all of these mammals were so bloody stupid that they could not quickly learn that humans were dangerous," says McPhee. "It makes no sense that people would want to act like these prehistoric Rambos running around killing everything in sight. We may never know exactly what happened to the mammoths. Martin acknowledges that a combination of factors, including McPhee's own "megavirus" theory, may have influenced the decline of the mighty mammals. And while many experts dismiss the idea that humans alone could have driven the mammoths to extinction, it is generally agreed that hunting didn't help their cause."

http://www.exn.ca/mammoth/Extinction.cfm
>> Anonymous
The mammoth populations on small islands managed to survive a lot longer than those on the mainland (dwarf mammoths on Wrangel island in the Arctic lived until about 4000 years ago) suggesting that human hunting/disease carried along with humans was the largest part of the mammoths decline, since one would think climate change would hit small, inbred populations on islands a lot harder than the mainland mammoths.

Also note that megafauna of all sorts tended to disappear all over the world as soon as people showed up.
>> Anonymous
>>118732

I remember reading this article too and was talking with my family about it just the other day. A few questions we came up with were:

A. would wooly mammoths overheat in this overall warmer Earth? Heck, they lived in the ice age.
B. What would they eat?
C. Could we get them to breed? It's taken us long enough to get Pandas to get it on.

Also, let's assume they get sheared in the spring. How comfortable would a wooly mammoth sweater be? I'm voting that its comfort would be over 9000.
>> Anonymous
BLAWL MAMMOTH
>> Anonymous
>>119093

I don't see why they couldn't survive. Muskoxen and yaks have basically the same fur/coat structure and they do just fine even in some temperate areas.
>> Anonymous
>>119093
1. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but there are still cold areas on this planet. Also animals with a comparable fur that lived in the exact same environment, such as musk oxen. No problem here.

2. They would eat the same plants as they did before. Their stomach contents have often frozen with them, and in some cases there's even stuff left in the mouth. There has not been a mass extinction of cool steppe flora (even though those steppes have become a lot more scarce with no mammoths to maintain them). Some people maintain that a relict population of mammoths might still persist somewhere deep in the Siberian wilderness (not likely, though).


3. The problem with pandas was that people were trying to second-guess panda mating and got it all wrong. There's no problem anymore. What troubles me is that mammoths were intelligent animals that learned most of the things about their environment from adults, and there's no grown up mammoths to raise them anymore (or at least, as far as we know).
>> Anonymous
     File :-(, x)
the problem was indeed a HITMAN. END OF DISCUTION. (AVE MARIA playing in background)
>> Anonymous
>>119186
Hitman is not the problem, but the solution.
>> Anonymous
Assuming they could clone one mammoth, how are they going to build a population?

They are going to have to hybridize it with one of the three existing species. Or, they are going to have to uncover at least a couple hundred different individuals in order to have a gene pool large enough so the offspring don't turn out like mongos.

Even if they had 300 mammoths that would still be an incredibly small gene pool to attempt to rebuild a population.

Further, where exactly are these things gonna go? People were scared enough to have buffalo reintroduced to the wild, there is no way Americans would ever let there be wild elephants running around. Maybe the Canadians would be cool with it but what happens when on of the Canadian mammoths crosses the border? We all know how Americans despise illegal immigrants, it could start WWIII.

So, for the sake of world peace and genetic diversity I must say no to mammoth cloning.
>> Anonymous
>>118648
yeah read this on a science website earlier... pretty amazing what they're gunna try do with it
>> Anonymous
Retarded anon is retarded
>> Anonymous
>>119219
statement about yourself?
>> Anonymous
>>119203
>>They are going to have to hybridize it with one of the three existing species.

LOL WUT? No extant mammoth species.

(Yeah, I guess you mean elephants, but the Indian elephant being the more closely related and relatively tameable is the obvious candidate for a surrogate mother. However, forget hybridization, they're still too different genetically for that to have much chance of happening. They could realistically only implant mammoth clone embryos in elephant mothers, which limits the donors quite a bit... we'd probably never get a self-sustaining mammoth population anyway.)