A biotech company that is working toward the Jurassic Park-style cloning of woolly mammoths has announced that they have made a crucial breakthrough in producing elephant stem cells, a key step in recreating the furry pachyderms, a species that has been extinct for over four thousand years. According to a statementread more
A well-preserved woolly mammoth calf has been excavated in the Canadian Arctic, the first time such a discovery has been made in North America, and only the second baby mammoth to be recovered in the world, an event that is being called the “most important discovery in paleontology in Northread more
The growing international ban on the trade of ivory from elephant tusks has been increasing the focus on harvesting the illicit material from an unusual source: the tusks of long-extinct mammoths, preserved in the frozen Siberian tundra. Out of the 72 tons of mammoth ivory exported by Russia in 2017, 80 percent was to China–the world’s largest market for the substance–and now that China has instituted a ban on their ivory trade, the market for frozen mammoth tusks may be heating up.
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Scientists are now closer than ever to bringing an ice age species back to life. Researchers from the Northeast Federal University in Yakutsk found liquid blood in a 10,000-year-old mammoth discovered off the coast of northeast Russia. With the help of a team of South Korean scientists, they plan to use the liquid blood to clone a woolly mammoth.
Semyon Grigoriev, the head of the expedition that discovered the mammoth said, "The fragments of muscle tissues, which we’ve found out of the body, have a natural red color of fresh meat. The reason for such preservation is that the lower part of the body was underlying in pure ice."
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