A Baby Mammoth

[jadnifer]

I just got done watching a show on the Science Channel called The Baby Mammoth.

It was very interesting. In Siberia, they found the head of a baby mammoth. It had no trunk or tusks that they could see. They did DNA testing and they were able to find out how old the baby was when it died (7 months) and what sex the baby was which happened to be male.

They were able to find out how old the baby was because when they did a cross section of the tusk that they found inside the skull, there was a neo-natal line present. It had never been seen before.

They also said that because they were able to find the DNA and map the mammoth genome that it would be possible to bring back the wooly mammoth. It's not a question of if anymore, it's a question of when. I have a problem with this for a couple of reasons:

1) The wooly mammoth is extinct for a reason.

2) Where the hell would we keep an animal like that?

3) How the hell would we have enough food for them?

What are your thoughts on bringing back extinct animals, especially the wooly mammoth?

[Gaf The Horse With Tears]

We would keep them in Cananda... northern Canada and Alaska. They would prolly eat about the same thing that modern elephants eat... trees.

[jadnifer]

We would keep them in Cananda... northern Canada and Alaska. They would prolly eat about the same thing that modern elephants eat... trees.

Yes, but are those places cold enough for them. The Earth has warmed up a lot since the end of the Ice Age when they became extinct. They are also much bigger than modern day elephants. if we created a whole bunch of them, they would eventually run out of things to eat.

I just don't see how it would be ethical to do this in the first place.

Do you think that it is ethical? Do you think that there is a use to bring them back anyway?

[Gaf The Horse With Tears]

Should be cold enough in the northern regions.

Ethical? To play God? No.

A use? I hear they taste good.

[Troy Spiral (13)]

If they somehow cloned mammoths into existence once again, they could easily just exist in zoos if they couldn't exist in the wild. I think from an "ethical" standpoint it would just be unethical to release them, uncontrolled into the wild. From a zoological, cellular study and almost every other kind of life science study standpoint the benefits could be enormous.

Things like domestic "dogs" (Wolves) do not exist in the "real" wild as such. We have been playing god in a sense probably the entire history of the human race. Domestic animals would be "extinct" if it wasn't for them living at our pleasure. Some hardcore animal rights activists would say domestic animals are our genetically engineered slaves. Which really is about right , just they are so well engineered they don't revolt. We didn't have enough time with the human slaves to get them to that point (Killing off the rebellious or dangerous ones and breeding the more docile generation after generation) so we were left with nothing but dependent, subservients the way we have with the animal kingdom.

I'm not sure exactly why mammoths went extinct (don't have the energy to look it up at the moment) but extinction isn't necessarily a measure of a animals worth or lack of worth, sometimes they are just unlucky and did not become widespread enough before the "catastrophe" that caused their extinction hit (or they morph into a different animal). Many animals that do survive are likewise not all that efficient, they just survive due to various other luck-based issues, not necessarily that they are more or less useful to the biosphere than extinct animals. But it is true in general that animals do go extinct that just don't cut it, and are probably better left extinct.

[phee]

Should be cold enough in the northern regions.

Ethical? To play God? No.

A use? I hear they taste good.

If this actually happens it's going to probably because some richer than God, Cheneysque, old fuck is going to spend a fortune to have one cloned just so that he can allow it to run loose on his fenced in property so he can go and shoot it for "sport"

But maybe that is the non-morning person in me talking..

[jadnifer]

Troy, you have very good points. They could be kept in a zoo. They can keep the polar bears in the zoo, so maybe they would be able to house a mammoth.

I do agree that it's not always the animal's fault that it went extinct.

I guess my biggest concern is what it would do to the ecosystem. Adding that large of an animal now, even in captivity, would need a lot of food and it has to come from some place. I just think that even though we are able to do it, doesn't necessarily mean that we should. I think that we should just leave well enough alone.

[nilhil_glory]

looking at when the animal was around the time being

food was scarce so im sure as big as the animal is it did not consume as much as you think it did

as for living conditions it wouldnt be hard at all to keep one

however

we would not generally know its temperment and they would probably be kept from other animals

such as how they learned to seperate elephants and rhinos becouse elephants beat up on the rhinos

my major guesses as to why it went extinct was majority the humans

from what i remember reading about them was how humans used to hunt the whole heard and then chase them into a giant pit with tourches and they all would fall off of a cliff into their death, or they would be speared to death, along with other hostile preditors

personally if they do bring it back

they should work on a dodo bird aswell

[jadnifer]

looking at when the animal was around the time being

food was scarce so im sure as big as the animal is it did not consume as much as you think it did

as for living conditions it wouldnt be hard at all to keep one

however

we would not generally know its temperment and they would probably be kept from other animals

such as how they learned to seperate elephants and rhinos becouse elephants beat up on the rhinos

my major guesses as to why it went extinct was majority the humans

from what i remember reading about them was how humans used to hunt the whole heard and then chase them into a giant pit with tourches and they all would fall off of a cliff into their death, or they would be speared to death, along with other hostile preditors

personally if they do bring it back

they should work on a dodo bird aswell

Those are also very good points. Would we be able to have a cold enough enviornment for them in captivity because I really don't think that there are any areas that are cold enough for them anymore?

Now that you mention it , I also remember reading about how man was probably a major factor in their extinction, just like with the extinction of the dodo bird.

As far as the dodo bird is concerned, we would have to find one that is well enough preserved to be able to extract DNA from it before we can even think about recreating them.

I guess some of my feelings on this come through on a religious side point more than a scientific one. I believe that God made them extinct for a reason and that well enough should be left alone. I know that not everyone agrees with me on that, and that is all right. That is just what I believe.

[dionysus1999]

1) The wooly mammoth is extinct for a reason.

2) Where the hell would we keep an animal like that?

3) How the hell would we have enough food for them?

What are your thoughts on bringing back extinct animals, especially the wooly mammoth?

[Gaf The Horse With Tears]

1) The wooly mammoth is extinct for a reason.

2) Where the hell would we keep an animal like that?

3) How the hell would we have enough food for them?

What are your thoughts on bringing back extinct animals, especially the wooly mammoth?

1) Evidence suggests our ancestors were most directly responsible.

2) You'd certainly need a big backyard.

3) Excellent question, you'd need quite a few bales of hay.

1) Really? because most books and sites say that climate change is most responsible with Man's hunting habits coming in second.

2) the same places they lived before. Which was pretty much everywhere with plains.

3) The same thing that other elephant species eat... trees.

[ttogreh]

Jadnifer, this is a really interesting idea. Personally, I would love to see a mammoth walking the great plains of northern Canada and Siberia. That being said, these animals have been extinct for thousands of years. With thoughtful introspection, I must say that bringing them back to life would be a terrible idea.

The ecosystem that the mammoths were a part of simply does not exist any more. There are no more huge ground sloths to compete with over food, (I don't know if that really happened all that much; this is more of an essay than it is a treatise), there are no more saber toothed cats to cull their young, and I would probably not be wrong in thinking that the winters are milder than before.

Simply put, these animals would most likely out compete and displace the current residents of the northern plains. Indeed, they may very well expand their numbers in such a dramatic manner that systematic culls of herds by Canadian and Siberian authorities would be inevitable. The elephant culls in Africa are horrific enough as it is.

So, I think, on balance, these animals have had their time, and we should admire them in museums, not safaris.

[sass_in_the_pants]

The science channel lied to you.

The wooly mammoth is very, very, very extinct and is not coming back.

Why did they claim they could bring back the wooly mammoth? Did they say they found living cells? That would really surprise me if they did.

However, I appreciate the ethical debate it raises. We're not even certain that cloning animals, LIVING animals tha are already here, is ethical so bringing one back from way back when, well, that's another pandora's box.

But, wow, how cool would it be to see one?!?!?!

[ManicQueen]

Oh c'mon, you wouldn't wanna toss peanuts at one of those

at the local zoo?

I just got done watching a show on the Science Channel called The Baby Mammoth.

It was very interesting. In Siberia, they found the head of a baby mammoth. It had no trunk or tusks that they could see. They did DNA testing and they were able to find out how old the baby was when it died (7 months) and what sex the baby was which happened to be male.

They were able to find out how old the baby was because when they did a cross section of the tusk that they found inside the skull, there was a neo-natal line present. It had never been seen before.

They also said that because they were able to find the DNA and map the mammoth genome that it would be possible to bring back the wooly mammoth. It's not a question of if anymore, it's a question of when. I have a problem with this for a couple of reasons:

1) The wooly mammoth is extinct for a reason.

2) Where the hell would we keep an animal like that?

3) How the hell would we have enough food for them?

What are your thoughts on bringing back extinct animals, especially the wooly mammoth?

[Gaf The Horse With Tears]

The science channel lied to you.

The wooly mammoth is very, very, very extinct and is not coming back.

Why did they claim they could bring back the wooly mammoth? Did they say they found living cells? That would really surprise me if they did.

However, I appreciate the ethical debate it raises. We're not even certain that cloning animals, LIVING animals tha are already here, is ethical so bringing one back from way back when, well, that's another pandora's box.

But, wow, how cool would it be to see one?!?!?!

Woolly Mammoth Resurrection

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 (see photo).

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.

[sass_in_the_pants]

Thanks for the link, Gaf.

I talked to Guy about it and showed him the link, and he was explaining to me how all of that is a bunch of nonsense and I asked him why and he told me, but I wasn't listening so I asked him to type it out for me. I know that the people on this board are all into some DNA and the such, so I thought you might find his opinions on the matter interesting.

There isn’t going to be viable sperm preserved in a mammoth after 100 years frozen in the tundra, let alone 10,000. An ovum is even less likely. We keep cells in liquid nitrogen after taking great care to properly preserve them using chemicals that prevent ice crystals from forming in the cells (which would tear them apart). Liquid nitrogen is -195.79 °C (-320.42 °F), which is far, far colder than even the coldest recorded temperature on Earth which was −89.6 °C (−128.6 °F) in Antarctica, let alone in the permafrost where the temperatures do fluctuate and are higher than that. BUT, even if you were able to find viable sperm, the wooly mammoth is predicted to have had 58 chromosomes, while modern elephants have 56, and so you most likely wouldn’t get a viable offspring anyway (and DEFINITELY not one which could reproduce).

The truth is that they’ve barely been able to reproduce and map the mitochondrial genome of mammoths (see Science. 2007 Sep 28;317(5846):1927-30; Whole-genome shotgun sequencing of mitochondria from ancient hair shafts), and the mitochondrial genome is much smaller (in humans it’s 0.0006% of the size), much less complex (in rings instead of chromosomes), and contained at much higher copy number (several copies per mitochondria; lots of mitochondria per cell) in an organism than the nuclear DNA. And even if we knew the DNA sequence, we can’t clone from that yet, if ever. We just don’t know enough about biology yet, in truth we barely understand anything about biology in the kind of detail that you would need to do this. We got Dolly to work sort of (using Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer), but why it worked, and exactly how it worked is still way beyond us. Give us 100 years, then maybe we can talk about this. The problem with science is the same in a lot of life, everyone wants the flash but no one wants to work out how to build bulb.

In short, you have a better chance of just finding a breeding pair of living mammoths that have just escaped detection all these years.

[jadnifer]

Jadnifer, this is a really interesting idea. Personally, I would love to see a mammoth walking the great plains of northern Canada and Siberia. That being said, these animals have been extinct for thousands of years. With thoughtful introspection, I must say that bringing them back to life would be a terrible idea.

The ecosystem that the mammoths were a part of simply does not exist any more. There are no more huge ground sloths to compete with over food, (I don't know if that really happened all that much; this is more of an essay than it is a treatise), there are no more saber toothed cats to cull their young, and I would probably not be wrong in thinking that the winters are milder than before.

Simply put, these animals would most likely out compete and displace the current residents of the northern plains. Indeed, they may very well expand their numbers in such a dramatic manner that systematic culls of herds by Canadian and Siberian authorities would be inevitable. The elephant culls in Africa are horrific enough as it is.

So, I think, on balance, these animals have had their time, and we should admire them in museums, not safaris.

I myself would think it interesting to see one. They were majestic animals. But I also know that they had their day, and they are no longer here and that I have to admire them in museums.