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Palaeontology

Breakthrough as mammoth chromosomes found preserved in ice

By T.K. Randall
July 11, 2024 · Comment icon 8 comments
Woolly mammoth.
Could we one day see a live mammoth walk the Earth again ? Image Credit: Bing AI / Dall-E 3
The discovery brings the idea of 'de-extincting' the woolly mammoth one step closer to reality.
De-extinction might seem like science fiction right now, but over the next few years we could see the first ever extinct animal (such as a thylacine, mammoth or dodo) being brought back to life.

Now a new discovery in the Siberian permafrost has made this eventuality seem closer than ever.

Dating back 52,000 years, the remains have been described as "a new type of fossil" owing to the fact that they exhibit a level of preservation so great that the animal's chromosomes are still intact.

Essentially a section of frozen mammoth skin, this "beef jerky" even has long tufts of hair on it.
Such an immaculate level of preservation is unusual because mammoth remains are usually damaged due to repeated thawing and freezing over thousands of years.

This example, however, was thought to have been 'flash frozen' and never once thawed out.

"The variance that you're able to capture with this mammoth genome is opening a new door for comparison between species," said study co-author Cynthia Perez Estrada.

"Just having that footprint of the chromatin organization in three-dimensional space is incredible."



Source: Gizmodo | Comments (8)




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Recent comments on this story
Comment icon #1 Posted by OverSword 7 months ago
I remember reading a theory a few years ago that if mammoths could be reintroduced to Siberia it could slow or reverse the melting of the permafrost there.  If that happened that would seal up a big source of CO2.
Comment icon #2 Posted by MysteryMike 7 months ago
All we'd be doing is bringing back elephants resembling mammoths. The mammoths we all knew are long gone.
Comment icon #3 Posted by Stiff 7 months ago
Considering that they share around 99% DNA I'd say that bringing back elephants that resemble mammoths is basically... bringing back mammoths.
Comment icon #4 Posted by Ell 7 months ago
Maybe we can crossbreed them with sheep and dairy cows for mammoth wool and mammoth milk?
Comment icon #5 Posted by Grim Reaper 6 7 months ago
Thats an interesting idea EII, but if we did Cows and Sheep would no longer have job!
Comment icon #6 Posted by Cho Jinn 7 months ago
Presuming we'd eat these mammoths, how would be best prepare them?  Sources say that their closest relatives are lean and somewhat fibrous, so we'd probably want to marinate them with an acid - say, orange juice or apple cider vinegar - for some time, and then perhaps smoke them using cherry wood pellets.
Comment icon #7 Posted by Ell 7 months ago
We need mammoth cherry trees, obviously.   The unemployed sheep and dairy cows could be retrained as mammoth hair dressers and mammoth nail stylists.
Comment icon #8 Posted by Stiff 7 months ago
That would be quite a mammoth task.


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