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I hesitate to post this news on April Fool’s Day, the day when cynicism crushes all possibility of wonder, but it doesn’t look like a joke as far as I can see, and the article isn’t from today. Apparently scientists found a Woolly Mammoth skeleton in Siberia last year that was well preserved enough that there’s now a “high chance to clone the mammoth,” an animal that hasn’t roamed the Earth for around 4,000 years, unless you count your mom.
The experts believe they will be able to extract high quality DNA from the remains which have undergone a unique autopsy in Yakutsk, capital of the Sakha Republic.
Radik Khayrullin, vice president of the Russian Association of Medical Anthropologists, said in Yakutsk: ‘The data we are about to receive will give us a high chance to clone the mammoth.’
We must have a reason to do this, as it is one thing to clone it for scientific purpose, and another to clone for the sake of curiosity’.
‘It will be a different mammoth to the one living 43,000 years ago, specially taking into account that there will be interbreeding with a female elephant.’
If and when experiments begin, an elephant will be the surrogate mother, enabling the species to be brought back from the dead.
So, not just a Mammoth, but an elephant-mammoth hybrid. Everyone knows awesome, weird stuff happens when you combine species. Ligers (which are a real thing) are much bigger than either their lion or tiger parents, and tigons, as we all know, eat too much and they smell like poo. Who knows what secrets the mammophant will bring? Telepathy? Keytar skills? An inexhaustible craving for pizza?
Viktoria Egorova, chief of the Research and Clinical Diagnostic Laboratory of the Medical Clinic of North-Eastern Federal University, said: ‘We have dissected the soft tissues of the mammoth – and I must say that we didn’t expect such results. The carcass that is more than 43,000 years old has preserved better than a body of a human buried for six months.
The creature was believed to be aged around 50 or 60 when it died.
The mammoth disappeared from Siberia at the end of the Pleistocene period some 10,000 years ago in circumstances that are a matter of scientific debate.
Climate change and hunting by humans may have been factors. An isolated population of the creature survived on Wrangel Island until around 4,000 years ago. [SiberianTimes via HuffPo]
Well as long as we’re pissing in God’s face I say we start right where we left off and stick these suckers on a big game ranch in Texas once they’re cloned. Then we can blow the shit out of them with fighter jets with truck nutz dangling out the back. YEE HAW, EAT MY SHORTS, NATURE! Tell me that wouldn’t be awesome.
