Woolly Mammoth Resurrection? "Jurassic Park" planned?

Fresh from the Siberian tundra, an 18,000-year-old frozen woolly mammoth is on display at the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi, Japan. Still partially tufted with hair, the Ice Age plant-eater's head and other parts are stored in a giant refrigerator-turned-laboratory.



A team of Japanese genetic scientists aims to bring woolly mammoths back to life and create a Jurassic Park-style refuge for resurrected species. The effort has garnered new attention as a frozen mammoth is drawing crowds at the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi, Japan.
The team of scientists, which is not associated with the exhibit, wants to do more than just put a carcass on display. They aim to revive the Ice Age plant-eaters, 10,000 years after they went extinct.
Their plan: to retrieve sperm from a mammoth frozen in tundra, use it to impregnate an elephant, and then raise the offspring in a safari park in the Siberian wild.
"If we create a mammoth, we will know much more about these animals, their history, and why they went extinct," said Kazufumi Goto, head scientist at the Mammoth Creation Project. The venture is privately funded and includes researchers from various institutions in Japan.
Many mammoth experts scoff at the idea, calling it scientifically impossible and even morally irresponsible.
"DNA preserved in ancient tissues is fragmented into thousands of tiny pieces nowhere near sufficiently preserved to drive the development of a baby mammoth," said Adrian Lister, a paleontologist at University College London in England.
Furthermore, Lister added, "the natural habitat of the mammoth no longer exists. We would be creating an animal as a theme park attraction. Is this ethical?"

Ice Age Giants

Mammoths first appeared in Africa about four million years ago, then migrated north and dispersed widely across Europe and Asia.
At first a fairly generalized elephant species, mammoths evolved into several specialized species adapted to their environments. The hardy woolly mammoths, for instance, thrived in the cold of Ice Age Siberia.
In carvings and cave paintings, Ice Age humans immortalized the giant beasts, which stood about 11 feet (3.4 meters) tall at the shoulder and weighed about seven tons.
"It is hard to imagine that woolly mammoths browsed around the places where we live now, and our ancestors saw them, lived with them, and even hunted them," said Andrei Sher, a paleontologist and mammoth expert at the Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution in Moscow, Russia.
At the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago, woolly mammoths dwindled to extinction as warming weather diminished their food sources, most scientists believe.
There are believed to be ten million mammoths buried in permanently frozen soil in Siberia. Because of the sparse human population in the region, though, only about a hundred specimens have been discovered, including two dozen complete skeletons. Only a handful of complete carcasses have been found.
In 2002 hunters stumbled across the mammoth now on display in Japan. After a period of relatively warm weather, the head of the beast had been left protruding through the snow and ice cover.

Viable DNA?

The scientists with the Mammoth Creation Project are hoping to find a mammoth that is sufficiently well preserved in the ice to enable them to extract sperm DNA from the frozen remains.
They will then inject the sperm DNA into a female elephant, the mammoth's modern-day counterpart. By repeating the procedure with offspring, scientists say, they could produce a creature that is 88 percent mammoth within 50 years.
"This is possible with modern technology we already have," said Akira Iritani, who is chairman of the genetic engineering department at Kinki University in Japan and a member of the Mammoth Creation Project.
In 1986 Iritani's lab successfully fertilized rabbit eggs artificially, employing a technique now used in humans. In 1990 his colleague Goto, the Mammoth Creation Project head scientist, pioneered a breeding plan to save a native Japanese cow species by injecting dead sperm cells into mature eggs.
The current challenge, however, is finding viable woolly mammoth DNA. The DNA in mammoth remains found to date has been unusable, damaged by time and climate changes.
"From a geologist's point of view, the preservation of viable sperm is very unlikely, and this is so far confirmed by the poor condition of cells in the mammoth carcasses," said Sher, the Russian paleontologist.
Current Siberian permafrost temperatures are 10 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 12 to 8 degrees Celsius), which may not be cold enough for DNA survival.
Sperm is not the only possible DNA source, and mammoth-elephant crossbreeding isn't the only potential way to resurrect the woolly mammoth.
An alternative method would be to clone a mammoth from DNA found in mammoth muscles or skin. To do this, however, scientists would need preserved cells with some unbroken strands of DNA.
"There is no evidence this exists, and even if it did, it is very unlikely to be preserved without significant errors having accumulated—probably leading to birth defects," said Lister, the London paleontologist.

Safari Park

The Japanese scientists, however, are not deterred.
Iritani is planning a summer expedition to Siberia to search for more carcasses.
His team has already picked out a home for living mammoths in northern Siberia. The preserve, dubbed Pleistocene Park, could feature not only mammoths, but also extinct species of deer, woolly rhinoceroses, and even saber-toothed cats, he said.
"This is an extension of my work for the past 20 years in trying to save endangered species," Iritani said.
Other scientists are less enthusiastic about the project.
"Even if the cloning experiment is successful, they are not reconstructing the past but rather creating a new mammoth-like creature," said Anatoly Lozhkin, an Ice Age expert at the Northeast Interdisciplinary Scientific Research Institute in Magadan, Russia.
"Scientists are always able to learn from every experiment, but I am not sure that cloning a mammoth will help us significantly move forward our understanding of the animal or the conditions under which it lived," Lozhkin said.

Very interesting to say the least, I like Woolly Mammoths, I think they are quite cute!

Are they serious personally i believe a creature that has been gone from this earth for so long should not be brought back and how would they contain it, it would be much larger and tougher than an average elephant.

THAT would be pretty damn cool to see !

Are they serious personally i believe a creature that has been gone from this earth for so long should not be brought back

Even if we're the ones that exterminated it (or our ancient ancestors)?

Even if humans were not involved, that doesn't mean the animal was somehow inferior to modern species; extinction is usually actually non-selective, in that organisms are exposed to conditions beyond the scope of or even qualitatively different from those they evolved to deal with (for more information, see Raup's numerous scholarly papers on the subject).

and how would they contain it, it would be much larger and tougher than an average elephant.

Actually, most mammoths were about the same size as the modern Asian elephants. Some species were larger (and dwarf froms existed on islands), but the siberian mammoths (the only ones preserved in sufficiently cold conditions to have even a chance of recovering DNA) weren't much bigger than what we see today at the zoo.

Not to mention that it's actually fairly easy to contain an animal which is physically incapable of climbing, jumping or even true running. Some sturdy walls and a decent trench will do it, as evidenced by most zoo enclosures.

Henry

*****

Originally Posted by Mokele

Even if humans were not involved, that doesn't mean the animal was somehow inferior to modern species

I guess i dont quite understand this logic? how can it NOT be inferior? sure they have the same "general" makeup of a modern day elephant, but habits and diet are completely different. whos to say their interactions woudlnt be different too? whos to say well be able to Feed this animal if they were to do this and bring it back to life? of course it will be inferior to modern day elephants because it will not be able to survive as they do to the true extent of its life if it were in the ice age. just as a modern day elephant could in no way be tossed into the ice age and be expected to live.

How do you say this? my knowledge is, Natural selection chooses the strongest and fittest species to survive and live in current conditions. a mammoth would be inferior to modern day elephants because its immune system of the days of old, would also by no means be up to par with the days of now. thats not to say it couldnt possibly be, but going based solely on genetics and DNA makeup right?...This would only mean that 1/2 the DNA used would be immune to modern day disease in this example: the females part of the DNA.

; extinction is usually actually non-selective, in that organisms are exposed to conditions beyond the scope of or even qualitatively different from those they evolved to deal with

How is exticntion NOT natural selection, how is, a species being subject to a different sudden climate like mammoths not natural selection? if a species is not able to COPE with the current trend in conditions and cannot learn to or adapt, it is essentially removed from the list because of these incapabilities. This is natural selection at its finest hour. Darwin proves this consitently throgout his studys on the evoloution of man and other species.
Sure, Humans have an effect on their envrionment with cars, and cause the death-rate of many amphibians and other such creatures to be taken off the list because of global warming effects, also overpopulation, and inhabiting these creatures envrionments/habitats for their own joy, and destryoying them, but in essence, this is still a movement of natural selection. in these poor creatures cases, we are essentially the strongest and fittest species. If a species is not able to cope, it is removed, wether it be bad or good for the chain. Take (mind the spelling) Prerigan Falcons. they have learned to cope and live in Citys like New York and other such places. They have learned to cope and live with human life, and therefore are going to outlast those species that cannot cope with such things as citys and whatnot.

I just really dont understand what you mean when you say all of this. and if you care to explain, please, do so.

Ok, for the example, I'll use the US king and milk snakes (Lampropeltis). They're all over the US, in a wide variety of habitats, from the Everglades to deserts to plains. Each, obvious, has adapted to their own local habitat. Their eggs incubate best at local temperatures, they can deal with the venom of local hots that they eat, they hibernate (or don't) at the optimal times, etc.

Now, let's say there's a major volcanic event, an eruption of one of the so-called 'super-volcanoes', which belches millions of tons of ash and pollutants into the atmosphere. Sunlight is blocked out, and temperatures plummet.

Some of this genus are adapted to cold climates, while others aren't. Obviously the latter will perish. But <u>that's not actually what's important</u>.

The important parts are that it occurs on such a large scale, and so fast, that local populations do not have time to adapt, and that the change is drastically beyond their normal tolerances. Are the Northern species better? In the case of temperature drop, such, but what if it had been a catastrophic *increase*, as happened at the end of the Permian? Then the Northerns would have died and the southerns survived.

Because large-scale extinction events are widely spaced in time, drastic in nature, and of a random form (will it be asteroid impact, volcanism, massive atmospheric composition change, drought, flood, or something else?), species cannot adapt to them. In the example, the Northerns survived only by good luck, by having the right genes of a random and unpredictable event.

Now, envision the aftermath of this event. Northern species will spread south, colonizing new habitats. Since evolution operates on a short time scale (what helps this generation) without "foresight", they will adapt to the warm, southern conditions. Then another eruption happens, and the southern ones die.

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The essential point is that evolution works generation-to-generation. This means that animals adapt to the here-and-now, not to events that happen every few thousand or million generations. Tropical animals adapt to warmth, polar animals adapt to cold. When a major, disasterous change occurs, these species will live or die not based on their intrinsic merits, but based on mere accidents of geography and habitat. Can one really say that one species is "better" or "worse" than another simply based on geography?

I think another fundamental concept is the notion of "better" and "worse" in evolution. *Everything* short of death and sterility is relative in evolution. A gene that helps in one environment hurts in another. Species adapt to their local surroundings, and one cannot compare them simply, especially if they've diverged significantly. Can you say a tapeworm is better or worse than the dog it inhabits? Better or worse at what? Each is adapted to ecologiclly relevant tasks, so a dog is better at running, but can't breed anywhere near as fast as a tapeworm. Which is the criterion for evaluation?

That's essentially mass extinction: You have a wide variety of organisms, adapted to their particular niches, and you arbitrarily and randomly pick a trait (cold resistance, heat resistance, oxygen needed, food needed, etc) and evalutate *all* organisms by it, whether or not this trait is relevant to their life in their niche.

For a good overview of the subject, there's a book, "Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck" by Raup, and numerous scientific papers on Google Scholar. I'd recommend Raup's 1986 papers in Science and his 1994 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Sepkoski has quite a few papers on it too, but most of the work is done by Raup.

I'm sorry if I'm not explaining this well, but I'll try to summarize: Evolution works on the short term, dealing with adaptation to the current local environment. Because mass extinction events (even minor ones like Ice Ages), are of an unpredictable nature and occur relatively infreuqently, animals are not able to 'adapt' in ways that ensure their survival (and even if they could, such adaptations would be overwhelmed by local selection pressures in the thousands of generations between such events). Since survival is therefore based on whether a species has the good fortune to possess a relevant adaptation from its prior evolution, which species go extinct cannot be said to be selective in the same manner as which animals survive in a population exposed to sub-extinction-level hardship.

I will say that I'm not sure about background extinctions; I haven't been able to find anything in my breif search of the literature about their selectivity or lack thereof.

Hopefully I've explained this well, if not, I can try again. If you *really* want, PM me and I can try to send you PDFs of the journal articles I mentioned.

Also, I do know it's a bit of an odd concept. It certainly took me by surprise when I learned it, and from what I've heard, it was quite surprising when it was first published. But, if you read the papers, look at the data, and think about it, it does actually make sense.

Henry

Scary, I don't like large animals with sharp tusks.