The 2007 discovery of a perfectly preserved, 40,000 year-old baby mammoth raised hopes that the animal’s high-quality DNA could lead to a revival of the species via cloning.
This week, an elaborately produced documentary from National Geographic Channel traces the path of the baby mammoth (”Lyuba”) from discovery in Siberia to analysis in Russia and Japan, as scientists try to piece together the details of its life and death.
Narrated by erstwhile Alias dad Victor Garber, the show makes impressive use of CGI animation and reenactments using the real-life participants to tell the story.
Globetrotting University of Michigan paleontologist Dr. Dan Fisher travels to Siberia to meet the reindeer herdsman who stumbled upon the mammoth and then to Japan to CT scan the find. He later performs investigative surgery and forensic dentistry on Lyuba. Along the way, he makes several breakthrough mammoth discoveries, including that baby mammoths ate their mothers’ feces(!).
Things only get dicey when the producers call on Dr. Fisher to “act” alongside the CGI.
So what about the cloning?
Despite teasing the possibility in the promotion of the show, the producers ultimately admit that cloning is still a remote possibility. While Lyuba’s DNA is the best preserved sample ever discovered, according to Fisher, “Cloning an animal as complex as a mammoth is far beyond our current technical capabilities, but there has been remarkable progress on various aspects of the problem. One day perhaps.”
Here at Discover, we’ll keep working on the dino-chicken.
April 22nd, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should….Isn’t that a quote straight out of Jurassic Park? Anyway, It doesn’t make the quote any less relevant…
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:41 pm
@ angela: Why not?
I think we could make ambiguous arguments against bringing them back. But is there any real definite reason why we shouldn’t?
April 22nd, 2009 at 11:20 pm
I think its a great idea. We could learn so much about their development and what genes are turned on and off and when. There is a great possibility for collecting info on the evolution of proteins, receptors, enzymes, etc. My only qualm is if people want to try to bring back the mammoths and keep them in zoos and the like. It needs to be scientific research strictly so that we can be sure that they won’t suffer unnecessarily.
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:43 am
How much we could learn from their development that we can’t learn from elephant embryos? Not that these are the easiest animal labs. there’s a reason why we user rats and mices.
I think to bring Mammoths back to life would be a nice idea, although with global warming ongoing we may find out that what was the syberian wasteland may turn into a grain basket coveted by humans. So we may end up not having a place to let them roam free. Mars, perhaps, like in Stephen Baxter’s novel(s)?
I also wonder how mammoth meat steak like.
April 23rd, 2009 at 11:04 am
Why not do it? Cloning a 40,000 year old mammoth would be amazingly cool — and it’s a realistically achievable (if difficult) first step before we attempt to resurrect other, even older specimens and species in the future. To assume that we couldn’t learn anything from a live mammoth that we don’t know from remains or elephants? How much can we really say about the behaviour of an extinct animal?
Seeing preserved remains and CGI animations is great. Seeing the real thing is AWESOME. Hell yeah, we’ll do it because we can!
April 23rd, 2009 at 1:06 pm
I’m with Jo! What an amazing find – and to be able to actually see it for ourselves is incredible.
April 26th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
It’s not a matter of should we clone it or not, it’s a matter of when. Cloning this animal is like going back with a timemachine and learning real life how these creatures lived. If not for science than for the fun or glory!
April 28th, 2009 at 9:44 am
The problem with the cloning idea is that, generally speaking, larger molecules tend to be less stable over time than smaller molecules.
DNA is a huge molecule and it breaks down very quickly, geologically speaking.
May 2nd, 2009 at 9:43 am
We are still working in the dark ages. This will all change as time and knowledge/technology advances. What was impossible yesterday (heavier-than-air machines will never fly), is common practice today. What is impossible today (cloning, other-than-oil energy) will be commonplace tomorrow.
Just be patient… T-Rex, the Mammoths, Pterosaurs, they’ll all be there.
May 11th, 2009 at 3:10 am
Another theory-
With the dragon skeltons they found in the frozen ice cave, i believe they should try to clone them. ?
October 5th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
The article says it is beyond our technology to clone this mammoth. But could it work if a process were used like with Dolly but use the egg of African or Indian Elephant to create the mammoth embryo and then implant the embryo into a female elephant to carry the mammoth to term?
Baby elephants eat the dung of adult elephants to establish enzymes they need for digesting vegetation. A cloned mammoth would not inherit anything from its previous generation except DNA since it separated from its previous generation by 40,000. That might make the milk found in the stomach of the baby important if they did try to clone it.
Maybe the mammoth would have a better chance of surviving if it were could raised by captive Indian Elephants and if it turned out that they had similar immune systems the mammoth might acquire into its body the organismd it needs survive in the world today.
Unless we find we find more Mammoths DNA there will only be one carbon copy mammoth unless they started inbreeding so there realty could not be herds because there would be no genetic diversity.
As humans we are very inconsistent in the respect and sacredness we give to different living things whether it be a cockroach, a cow, or a mammoth. If we did try to clone a mammoth it would consistent with the existing ethics we live by. It would seem sad and cruel and become very unpopular if baby mammoth died, was unhealthy or seemed unhappy.