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Mammoth find: Preserved Ice Age giant found with flowing blood in Siberia

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If they ever make clones, wouldn't reintroducing it to wildlife be counterproductive? We have horrortales of introductions of animals where they shouldn't be (rabbits in australia).

I'd imagine these clones would be put on a private island and turned into an amusement park. What could go wrong?
 

Jackpot

Banned
Why clone it? What would an animal that couldn't survive in our atmosphere be good for?

Mammoths can't survive in an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere?

Assuming you meant ecosystem instead, would you have stood outside Jurassic Park wondering what possible interest all these bozos had in seeing live dinosaurs.
 
If they ever make clones, wouldn't reintroducing it to wildlife be counterproductive? We have horrortales of introductions of animals where they shouldn't be (rabbits in australia).
It would probably be in captivity it's whole life and a sort of "research animal" where could learn more about the species and life at that time.
 

TheMan

Member
If they ever make clones, wouldn't reintroducing it to wildlife be counterproductive? We have horrortales of introductions of animals where they shouldn't be (rabbits in australia).
I really doubt they would spend all the necessary money and effort needed to clone one of these bad mamba jambas only to release it into the wild. They will be displayed in zoos , tickets will be sold, and millions will be made.
 

Jackben

bitch I'm taking calls.
Fuck cloning it for zoo purposes. I want to know what makes their blood survive super cryogenic process. If we can isolate the strand that allows this process we can use these findings to preserve human blood, organs and even bodies for prolonged periods of time. Think about it.The applications would be revolutionary.
 

zoukka

Member
Fuck cloning it for zoo purposes. I want to know what makes their blood survive super cryogenic process. If we can isolate the strand that allows this process we can use these findings to preserve human blood, organs and even bodies for prolonged periods of time. Think about it.The applications would be revolutionary.

I'm pretty sure there are plenty of animals that have those qualities and aren't extinct. But you have a point!
 

PJV3

Member
Fuck cloning it for zoo purposes. I want to know what makes their blood survive super cryogenic process. If we can isolate the strand that allows this process we can use these findings to preserve human blood, organs and even bodies for prolonged periods of time. Think about it.The applications would be revolutionary.

Boring.

I want a tiny mammoth that can carry shopping.


I'm joking about being boring.
 

Andrew.

Banned
You gotta pardon my ignorance guys, but how exactly do they create a mammoth out of this? Sure they have the blood and Im sure scientists will figure out how to fill in the blank sequences, but then what? What is the next step? Its not like a mammoth magically appears. Do they inject the blood into something like an elephant and then eventually a mammoth is born? Do they only get one shot? (I know I have no idea what Im talking about, but some info here would be great. Ive always been in the dark about this stuff).
 
inside%20muscles%20seen%20on%20body.jpg
Looks like... Parma ham! Yum.
 

PJV3

Member
He's talking about the possibility of hibernation pods dude!

The mini mammoth would be funnier.

But if people would rather go flying around the universe or sleep until 3013, then they're not seeing the bigger picture.

Whacky pets.
 

ToxicAdam

Member
You gotta pardon my ignorance guys, but how exactly do they create a mammoth out of this?

Click this: Large infographic

Someone much smarter than me pointed out, even if you were to create a 'near-mammoth', the baby wouldn't have a real mammoth mother to model it's behavior after. So, even if scientists perfect the genetic coding, you never are truly going to get a 'pure' resurrected animal as it once was.
 

kswiston

Member
What are Panda's good for?

The "Pandas are an evolutionary dead end" thing is an incorrect internet meme by this point, stemming from comments by Chris Packham 4-5 years ago. Several other biologists have offered rebuttals since then. The giant panda's chance of long term survival isn't all that good considering the climatic changes taking place in China, and the fact that there are only 1000 individuals left in the wild, but they would have been perfectly fine if human beings did not destroy much of their historical habitat in recent years. Plenty of animals are highly specialized for their particular habitats. That makes them vulnerable to extinction due to habitat destruction, but it does not make them evolutionary dead ends.
 

Andrew.

Banned
Click this: Large infographic

Someone much smarter than me pointed out, even if you were to create a 'near-mammoth', the baby wouldn't have a real mammoth mother to model it's behavior after. So, even if scientists perfect the genetic coding, you never are truly going to get a 'pure' resurrected animal as it once was.

Wow. Thanks dude! Helps a ton!
 

Angry Grimace

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
There's no controversy on my end. We totally need cloned mammoths walking the Earth again.
 

kswiston

Member
Why clone it? What would an animal that couldn't survive in our atmosphere be good for?

I think you have a mistaken interpretation of how much the world has changed since mammoths went extinct. The last of them went extinct 4000 years ago. The pyramid of Giza is older than that. Pretty much every animal currently in existence was also in existence 4000 years ago. Mammoths would have no problem breath modern air. They are not dinosaurs.

The real issue with cloning is that we would have to use elephant surrogates and repeated generations of selected breeding to get a genetically pure mammoth. Considering the gestation and maturation time of mammoths/elephants, that could take 100+ years. Also, elephants (and presumably mammoths) are highly social creatures, so there are some ethical concerns with cloning a species whose social structure is extinct.
 

Mgoblue201

Won't stop picking the right nation
I think I read somewhere that the half-life of DNA is only 500 years. So, even if you found a pristine sample, it still would take a ton of effort and work to get the DNA exactly right.
This actually came as a surprise to me, as I had read that DNA can last up to a million years, but according to a Nature article it's apparently true:

By comparing the specimens' ages and degrees of DNA degradation, the researchers calculated that DNA has a half-life of 521 years. That means that after 521 years, half of the bonds between nucleotides in the backbone of a sample would have broken; after another 521 years half of the remaining bonds would have gone; and so on.

Of course, the short half-life isn't a huge impediment for sequencing DNA from the most recent geological ages. According to the article, scientists can actually read DNA that's up to 1.5 million years old.
 

Grym

Member
This actually came as a surprise to me, as I had read that DNA can last up to a million years, but according to a Nature article it's apparently true:

By comparing the specimens' ages and degrees of DNA degradation, the researchers calculated that DNA has a half-life of 521 years. That means that after 521 years, half of the bonds between nucleotides in the backbone of a sample would have broken; after another 521 years half of the remaining bonds would have gone; and so on.

Of course, the short half-life isn't a huge impediment for sequencing DNA from the most recent geological ages. According to the article, scientists can actually read DNA that's up to 1.5 million years old.

Excuse my ignorance...I tend to not fully grasp (or remember) some of these scientific things. But does that half-life change if the specimen is frozen like these mammoths? Or is half-life essentially constant and not dependent on temperature.
 

kswiston

Member
Excuse my ignorance...I tend to not fully grasp (or remember) some of these scientific things. But does that half-life change if the specimen is frozen like these mammoths? Or is half-life essentially constant and not dependent on temperature.

Depends on what type of half life you are talking about. From what I understand, nuclear half-lives of unstable isotopes of atoms are largely constant across temperatures (at least for earth's range of temperatures), but since we are talking about changes in chemical bonds rather than changes in atomic nuclei, temperature and exposure to the sun would have a significant effect.

Also, with such a large sample, they should be able the sequence the DNA even with significant degradation. That frozen carcass will have trillions of copies of the genome afterall.
 

Cyan

Banned
I'm not super knowledgeable on Russian universities, but this does seem like it might be real news.

However, for future reference OP, Russia Today is banned on GAF. If you want to post a story from there, you're going to need a legit source.
 
This is really a remarkable finding. Bring this beast back to life. Give it Siberia as its playground. Mars was cool but bringing this thing back to the world would be truly epic. I would love to see mammoths roaming the frozen wastelands of this world again.

Hopefully they can find some white blood cells in that sample. Not to be overly simplistic, but you can take a nucleus from any viable cell in the mammoth and implant it into a elephant embryo to get the ball rolling. Of course, that's easier said than done and this is a horrible oversimplification.

Still really neat.
 
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