Its not complete, but its pretty close. This tidbit is interesting, however. No hope for cloning. Yet.
Why is this bumped? If they can bring back the Mammoth, they should. Clone some, and put them up in the Arctic.
^ It's possible that adding a link to the food chain might upset the balance and lead to moar global warming.
I actually think it wouldn't be a bad idea to preserve a complete DNA sample of every currently living species of plant or animal. Sort of a genetic library. If there were some worldwide catastrophe that destroyed most of the life on the planet, one day we might have the technology to repopulate the various lifeforms here. Or maybe if we go off to colonize other worlds we could take copies of this database with us and seed other worlds with our own familiar species of life. I'm also quite obsessed with the idea of archiving the sum of all human knowledge and experience somewhere for the sake of posterity.
I don't know why they're comparing them to African elephants. Mammoths are genetically closer to Asian elephants. Actually I think I can remember reading that mammoths are closer to Asian elephants than Asian elephants are to African elephants.
There's no evidence that mammoths need an ice age. It's not like dinosaurs who died off because of some change in the world they couldn't adapt to (asteroid I think it was). On the other hand, mammoths, like dodo's and in fact a bunch of other things, died out because of us. Men with spears and arrows in their hands killed them all. So if we can develop the technology to bring them back it would be kinda the right thing to do. Cleaning up our own mess. You can argue the dinosaurs are meant to be dead, but not mammoths.
Uhh Isnt the mammoth considered by most scientists to be close enough to an elephant for cloning, or more likely, insemination purposes?
We are, with plant species at least. The millenium seed bank has a billion seeds frozen already and hopes to have 10% of all plant species by the end of the decade. And more impressive and sci-fi like is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is similar, but frozen under a mountain in a Nowegian island.
It is interesting that they go extinct in the Old world around 12000 years ago, but continue to live in the Americas until 8000 years ago.
