by Staff writer
The fictitious resurrection of dinosaurs captured our imaginations at the cinema, but the quest to bring the extinct woolly mammoth back to life has begun in real life!
An international team of scientists has reached the ‘initial stage’ in efforts to clone the hairy beast, which last walked the Earth some 10,000 years ago.
That’s according to a cloning expert who has also claimed Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin is backing the Russian-South Korean bid to see the hairy monster tromp the Siberian ice once again.
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| Frozen carcass of a 39,000-year-old female woolly mammoth – [Japan Times] |
One of the Russian scientists, Semyon Grigoriev said: ‘There are two options for mammoth cloning.
‘The first is through the search for active cells. The second option is through artificial DNA synthesis.’
The mass death of mammoths began about 20,000 to 24,000 years ago but there is continuing debate about what drove the impressive creatures to extinction, with some blaming climate change and others overzealous human hunters.
The last major wave of deaths was about 9,000 to 12,000 years ago, although there is evidence mammoths survived in small groups near Alaska and at Wrangel Island, in the Russian Arctic, as recently as 3,700 years ago.
Let's see how this will happen!