Y'all know about their plans to bring the dodo out of retirement:
And heck, a while ago they somehow managed to make a meatball out of (urk) cloned wooly mammoth flesh:
And now scientists are going for broke and are just gonna bring back the entire wooly mammoth:
In the case of the woolly mammoth, ancient remnants of DNA have been found buried in fossils recovered from Earth's frozen tundra, but this information contains only around 100 base pairs, which isn't nearly enough to get a full genetic picture of this majestic pachyderm. But a new international study, spearheaded by researchers at Rice University, have successfully uncovered a fossilized chromosome from a 52,000-year-old mammoth that was essentially freeze-dried after it died in what is now Siberia. Instead of containing the usual 100 base pairs, this chromosomal discovery is upwards of a million times longer and shows both how the genome was organized in living cells and what genes were active in its skin tissue.
Scientists figuring out that mammoth DNA like:
As one scientist pointed out, "knowing the shape of an organism's chromosomes allows us to assemble the entire DNA sequence of extinct creatures, enabling insights that were previously impossible."
Or put another way:
We have a woolly mammoth tissue for which we know roughly which genes were switched on and which genes were off. This is an extraordinary new type of data...
Of course, a word of caution: It might not be all fun and games. Some experts warn that there may be negative consequences for bringing back the ol' woolster, insofar as "at best, humans create an elephant hybrid that doesn't really fit in the natural world or, at worst, we introduce an invasive species to the Arctic tundra."
We've been waiting hundreds of years for this, and now scientists are hitting us with all these ethical concerns about messing up the global ecology so we're like:
Can't wait to see what happens with this one!
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