Cloning the Woolly Mammoth and Other Extinct Animals

In the fall of 2005 an international team of scientists hailing from the United States, Canada, the UK and Germany successfully decoded 1% of a strand of DNA of the woolly mammoth that has been extinct for 10,000 years. Using an excellently preserved 27,000 year old specimen this team hopes to fully decode the woolly mammoth's DNA within a year.

The announcement created a great buzz around the idea of cloning the long extinct species. For the first time in history the idea of cloning an extinct species actually seems plausible and in fact nearly a reality.

In the early 1990's the possibility of cloning extinct animals was popularized by the Michael Crichton novel and later Stephen Spielberg movie Jurassic Park. In this story dinosaurs are cloned using DNA taken from ancient mosquitoes embalmed in amber. Being an adventure story things ultimately end up badly for everyone involved when surprisingly enough the dinosaurs escape.

Scientists today are not talking about cloning dinosaurs, however, which is still a remote possibility but rather woolly mammoths. Instead of a “Jurassic Park” many mammoth clone advocates wish to create a Pleistocene Park that would recreate the Ice Age conditions in which the woolly mammoth thrived.

The Woolly Mammoth

Woolly mammoths have long captured the popular imagination. Unlike dinosaurs, they once coexisted with man and were even hunted by man. It is widely believed that man was the ultimate cause of extinction of the woolly mammoth, an event that occurred about 10,000 years ago although recent evidence has shown that some mammoths survived in isolated pockets another 2,000 years or more.

For centuries man's primary knowledge of the mammoth came from its tusks. Like its closest modern relative, the African elephant, a mammoth's tusks are made of ivory. For hundreds of years and perhaps more residents of the harsh climates of Siberia mined the tundra permafrost for mammoth tusks; the ivory from which was sold around the world. This trade continued until at least the 1930's.