Mammoth is literally the hardest animal to do this for. Why not the dodo? Or anything smaller/with a faster generation time. I guess that wouldn't bring in investors and reporters...
Entrepreneur plans to resurrect woolly mammoths
21–30 of 97 posts
Re: Entrepreneur plans to resurrect woolly mammoths
#22Have they completely sequenced & assembled their DNA?
Sequenced yes, assembled, no.
Since there's no complete DNA of an individual specimen available, it's impossible to recreate an actual mammoth.
What they're hoping to do is basically isolate the genes that give certain traits (esp. cold adaptation, e.g. fur) and add them to the genome of Asian elephants.
So all they can get - best case - is some sort of mammoth/Asian elephant hybrid.
Re: Entrepreneur plans to resurrect woolly mammoths
#23Mammoth is literally the hardest animal to do this for. Why not the dodo? Or anything smaller/with a faster generation time. I guess that wouldn't bring in investors and reporters...
who wants to eat a dodo? no thanks.
Re: Entrepreneur plans to resurrect woolly mammoths
#24I remember reading a cryptozoological theory that there could still be some mammoths left, hidden in the vastness of Siberia. Absurd, obviously, but I always thought you could make a great film about a ragtag crew searching for the last remaining mammoth tribe in the wilderness.
Oh yeah, that theory started with an obviously bogus video.
Re: Entrepreneur plans to resurrect woolly mammoths
#25Have they completely sequenced & assembled their DNA?
Sequenced yes, assembled, no. Since there's no complete DNA of an individual specimen available, it's impossible to recreate an actual mammoth. What they're hoping to do is basically isolate the genes that give certain traits (esp. cold adaptation, e.g. fur) and add them to the genome of Asian elephants. So all they can get - best case - is some sort of mammoth/Asian elephant hybrid.
Can't the genome be assembled by aligning the reads against these Asian elephants?
Re: Entrepreneur plans to resurrect woolly mammoths
#26What’s the line from Jurassic Park? “They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”
Why do the dinosaurs always escape in Jurassic Park? Is it because the mathematics of chaos theory dictate that life always finds a way? Or is it because nobody pays to see a movie where a couple of brats go on an uneventful vacation to a dinosaur zoo?
It's definitely the latter, but through the power of repetition people started to believe it was the former.
Re: Entrepreneur plans to resurrect woolly mammoths
#27Can the modern Arctic environment really support herds of new mammoths? I know they used to roam the tundra 5,000 years ago, but they've been absent since. Wouldn't their reappearance displace the creatures that have taken their place in the ecosystem? Perhaps moose and arctic ox would suffer a decline? It seems really reckless to me to resurrect long dead creatures and to call that "healing the earth". I don't think…
The most reckless part is resurrecting highly intelligent social creatures.
The problem becomes apparent if we look at African elephants - if the matriarch is killed before passing on her knowledge, the herd often dies or disbands.
Now imagine just popping a small group of mammoths into existence who never roamed the Arctic tundra and expect them to just "know" how to mammoth. It takes many generations to achieve that and given that they can live about as long as humans, I doubt the researchers are really able to help with that.
Re: Entrepreneur plans to resurrect woolly mammoths
#28Mammoth is literally the hardest animal to do this for. Why not the dodo? Or anything smaller/with a faster generation time. I guess that wouldn't bring in investors and reporters...
I’m up for bringing back the dodo: at least we reverse the damage we’ve done that way
Re: Entrepreneur plans to resurrect woolly mammoths
#29I remember reading a cryptozoological theory that there could still be some mammoths left, hidden in the vastness of Siberia. Absurd, obviously, but I always thought you could make a great film about a ragtag crew searching for the last remaining mammoth tribe in the wilderness.
Actually that idea is intuitively easy to understand once you consider how large Siberia is. It's hard to imagine humans could extinguish any species there, even one that's so hard to miss.
But if course, we don't really know how Mammoths lived, how far they travelled, where and when they bred, etc.
Maybe all humans had to do was wait on some river crossings in a specific time of the year because some instincts told the Mammoths to traverse that route every year before mating season. Or maybe we didn't extinguish Mammoths and they died from some contagion (why should that only happen to humans?).
Re: Entrepreneur plans to resurrect woolly mammoths
#30This sounds more like dog breeding with elephants and gene editing than Jurassic Park. They are trying to make a cold weather adapted elephant
I suppose that begins to ask the question of what it means to be a wooly mammoth. If it fills the ecological niche of an , and it looks like and has many of the same genes as an , is it not an ? There's a bit of sci-fi fun in Neal Stephenson's wonderful "Seveneves"[0] where people are trying to re-populate the earth with animals after a planet-wide extinction event. They originally tried to make exactly the same wolv…
I forgot about that part!