There's nothing like a good plate of spaghetti and meatballs — the spaghetti al dente, the sauce rich and bright, the meat flavorful and fresh.
Or you could get meat that's, you know, eleven thousand years old. If you're into that sort of thing.
Scientists took the DNA sequence from a mammoth muscle protein and filled in the gaps with code from an elephant, the species' closest-living relative.
This sequence was then placed in the myoblast stem cells from a sheep, which replicated to grow 20 billion cells that were in turn used to grow the mammoth meat.
You gotta love it: We're finally, finally nailing down the science of genetic re-engineering of extinct species, we're just a breath or two away from bringing back animals long though vanished from the face of the Earth, and the first thing we do is make a meatball out of them.
It's only natural. Haven't we all thought about how a wooly mammoth tastes? I know I have. Anybody? Anybody else? No?
Well, the scientists who created this bizarre dish are actually not too keen to find out if it's good or not; they are "too afraid to eat it in case the ancient protein proves deadly." Not a ringing endorsement for mammoth meat.
'We haven't seen this protein for thousands of years,' said Professor Ernst Wolvetang, who made the meatball with Vow.
'So we have no idea how our immune system would react when we eat it.
'But if we did it again, we could certainly do it in a way that would make it more palatable to regulatory bodies.'
I have a theory:
Fortunately, the meat is "ridiculously easy and fast" to make.
The researchers are also reportedly eager to re-create dodo meat at some point, potentially bringing the dodo back onto charcoal grills across the world for the first time since 1662.
