Block Caving Project
Any idea wht happend about the mammoth found frozen in siberia ?, Did they manage to clone it?
The Jarkov mammoth, named for the local tribesmen who discovered the buried beast and who previously removed its valuable tusks, is a male who died at age 47, Buigues said. The exposed head has decomposed, but the body remains intact under the permafrost, or permanently frozen tundra.
The six-week excavation project will begin in September(1999) as temperatures cool and will entail digging out a 33-ton block of permafrost containing the mammoth’s body.
The block will be flown by Russia’s largest helicopter to the ice caves in Khatanga, Siberia, where a subfreezing laboratory will be fashioned for scientists.
They have been finding frozen pieces of mammoths and other extinct artic animals for a long time. Some samples are in better condition than others.
So far people have been able to get small pieces of DNA from Mammoths and other such frozen extinct animals. The technology is improving and in the next decade or so it is likely that a Mammoth will be completely sequenced from frozen samples from the artic.
Sequencing can be done on much more poorly preserved samples than cloneing. Even so such frozen samples are degraded and difficult to examine.
Once a complete genome is sequenced from Mammoth it is possible to SOMEDAY recreate a mammoth, but that is at least 20 years beyond current technology, possibly as much as 50-100 years away. But it will be immensely costly so it may not be justifiable unless major new scientific breakthroughs occur.
Unlike Jurrassic park. The mammoth is an actual POSSIBLE task for science. We have read short pieces of DNA from mammoths, No samples of Dinosaur DNA have ever been read.
Project Dark Angel – Western Cave & Free Fall Tower