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Would it be possible, with today's technology, to clone a woolly mammoth?
They used to range across this whole (North American) continent. I just giggle at thinking the havoc they'd cause let loose in northeastern forests again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curiously, it turns out that elephants eating fauna actually promotes plant and tree growth. I remember reading something (ca 2007?) about the possibility that reintroducing elephants to the American Southwest could lead to reforestation of areas that are currently desert. Which, of course, doesn’t really provide good justification for de-extinctifying the mammoth (although as I say this, I wonder if they might acual…
In that case the humans started the global warming when made the mammoths extinct - how ironic, the industrial revolution is just the top of the cake
The caps are melting and some people are all in on bringing back the woolly mammoth. How about the woolly rhino while we're at it? Maybe open a zoo in Death Valley to house 'em.
Unless we're headed for a Day After Tomorrow situation. Then it might be the mammoths keeping us in zoos
The caps are melting and some people are all in on bringing back the woolly mammoth. How about the woolly rhino while we're at it? Maybe open a zoo in Death Valley to house 'em.
Curiously, it turns out that elephants eating fauna actually promotes plant and tree growth. I remember reading something (ca 2007?) about the possibility that reintroducing elephants to the American Southwest could lead to reforestation of areas that are currently desert. Which, of course, doesn’t really provide good justification for de-extinctifying the mammoth (although as I say this, I wonder if they might acual…
> Pleistocene Park is a truly fascinating and daring experiment in the far Arctic, in Siberia, run by the Zimovs, Sergey and Nikita Zimov, a father and son scientific team, and their families. And they have this theory that large megafauna in the Pleistocene, things like mammoths and mastodons and bison, these large grazing animals, co-evolved with the grasslands that existed at the time. And so the grazers and the grasses maintained and sustained each other.
> These large animals would trample the trees and shrubs that would otherwise compete with grass, and the grass would provide these grazers with this rapidly regenerating vegetation that they could continually graze on. But it went further than that in their estimation, because, together, the grasses and the grazers, according to their theory, were helping to keep the permafrost frozen.
> So, for example, the grazers, just by being so large and by walking through these grasslands, were stripping away these insulating layers of snow, which allowed these frigid temperatures to penetrate deeper and keep that permafrost frozen. And grasses, just by virtue of being lighter, paler in color than trees, reflect more light and heat back to space. So they’re also keeping the land cooler. And so their idea is to bring back large grazing animals to Siberia, to recreate some version of these ancient Pleistocene grasslands, and thereby counteract the thawing of permafrost to some extent.
The caps are melting and some people are all in on bringing back the woolly mammoth. How about the woolly rhino while we're at it? Maybe open a zoo in Death Valley to house 'em.
Woolly mammoths were a geoengineer species that have no living proxy. Bringing them back is definitely a controversial project, but there's a case to be made that de-extincting the woolly mammoth could help prevent permafrost from melting.
if all animals will be clones, genetic diversity will be a problem. hopefully there is enough material available. seeing mammoths die out in real time would be more heartbreaking
Would it be possible, with today's technology, to clone a woolly mammoth?
They're actively trying: https://colossal.com/mammoth/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a42708517/s...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're actively trying: https://colossal.com/mammoth/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a42708517/s...
I do hope, millions of years in the future, the sentient cockroaches of earth have the curiosity to clone the long-extinct humans.
Is ti possible to do this for the giant ground sloth too, or there is no well preserved DNA sample for it so far?