Skeleton of Columbian mammoth, Mammuthus columbi, in the George C. Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits, Los Angeles, California. Click image for more info on Mammoths
In cosmic time, mammoths were just here. They went extinct around the same time the Earth began warming from its latest ice age, between 12,000 and 15,000 years ago. Although there is some evidence a small, scattered herd or two may have survived on remote Arctic islands while the Roman Republic was being formed on the other side of the world. Researchers attribute their extinction mostly to some combo of over hunting and climate change. Either way, they're gone now. But there may be a way to
bring them back!
Don't expect to see woolly mammoths walk the earth again anytime soon, but don't write off the mammoth revival project as a Pleistocene pipe dream, either: That's the message from a new TV documentary about efforts to re-create the long-extinct species with genetic trickery.
"It's all very much up in the air still," Tori Herridge, a paleobiologist at London's Natural History Museum, told NBC News. ... The documentary team, with Herridge as a scientific guide, had exclusive access to the Russian and South Korean scientists who recovered a frozen woolly mammoth from Siberia's permafrost last year. ...
That raised hopes that researchers could find an intact cell nucleus that contained the full set of DNA instructions for making a mammoth. If that could be done, the nucleus could be inserted into an elephant egg, sparked into cell division, and then implanted into a surrogate mother elephant. The result? A clone that should be virtually identical to the long-dead mammoth.
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Seen in the video above is a mysterious, very bright and very large event in the skies over Russia, well east of Moscow, several days ago. It's unclear if this was a meteor or something on the ground that blew up and lit the sky from below. But combined with rumors of a new Putin-powered anti-satellite weapon, the conspiracies are flying in fevered cyber-swamps.
- And speaking of way cool videos, NASA has posted this insanely cool model on Youtube, below, showing the dynamics of the primary man-made greenhouse gas, CO2, across the world that really should be seen in large screen and highest resolution.
- Last but certainly not least on this quasi-holiday weekend, and as long as we're talking turkey and recreating extinct animals, why not recreate a feathered dinosaur, that tastes just like chicken?