Mini mammoths?

Scientists say mammoths could be cloned by from fragments of the mammoth genome pieced together from disparate scraps of fur, flesh, or bone:

Though the stuffed animals in natural history museums are not likely to burst into life again, these old collections are full of items that may contain ancient DNA that can be decoded by the new generation of DNA sequencing machines.

If the genome of an extinct species can be reconstructed, biologists can work out the exact DNA differences with the genome of its nearest living relative. There are talks on how to modify the DNA in an elephant’s egg so that after each round of changes it would progressively resemble the DNA in a mammoth egg. The final-stage egg could then be brought to term in an elephant mother, and mammoths might once again roam the Siberian steppes. [NYT]

Experts estimate that it would only cost about $10 million to bring back mammoths. But in these tough economic times, funding this project won't be easy.

So, here's what I'm thinking.... It couldn't be that much more expensive to engineer a dwarf mammoth, small enough for the pet market. Suppose they started with a pygmy elephant ovum and a dwarf mammoth DNA, and worked their way down from there.

Chihuahuas are the descendants of wolves, right?

I know I'd invest a couple hundred bucks today to reserve my mini mammoth.

[Photo by David Reid, licensed under Creative Commons.]

Comments

[Lesley]

I shudder to think of the end result.

What would society do with cloned mammoths? Stuff them in zoos where they will die of foot rot from standing on concrete and other hard surfaces for decades. There is barely any space left in Asia or Africa for existing elephants and they continue to be hunted, poached, poisoned by humans who kill them for their ivory or compete with them for space.

We can't treat existing elephants with any decency, why recreate an extinct one?

Some projects deserve to be shelved.

[Alexandra Y.]

MINI MAMMOTHS

Alexandra Y.

A six-year-old female mammoth calf was found under the permafrost in north-west Siberia on the Yamal peninsula of Russia during the month of May in 2007.

This mammoth calf has been dubbed “Yamal mammoth” or “Lyuba”, after the wife of the reindeer herder who found the carcass in May, 2007. Yuri Khudi found the carcass near the Yuribei River in Russia’s Yamal-Nenets autonomous district.

Unlike the remains of other mammoths that had been found in the past, Lyuba is completely intact with the eyes and the trunk present. Only part of the tail is missing, according to Alexei Tikhonov, the deputy director of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a member of the delegation.

“In terms of its state of preservation, this is the world’s most valuable discovery,” he said.

In 1997, the Jarkov mammoth was found and geneticists stated that if they were given a good batch of DNA, they could create a baby mammoth in 22 months. Despite this offer, the research was unable to continue since the DNA from the mammoth was either incomplete or damage.

Researchers hope to find DNA from Lyuba that has not been damaged. This will open the window for cloning.

The Russian government has stated that all mammoth remains found are government property; unfortunately, their warnings are ignored by many of the citizens. Local people search the Siberian permafrost for such remains but do not do so in the name of science. They prefer to sell the tusks and hair for money.

“Originally it was for ivory, now it is everything. You can now go on almost any fossil marketing website and find mammoth hair for $50 an inch. It has grown beyond anyone’s imagination.” Says Dr. Larry Agenbroad, director of the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs research center in South Dakota, US.

Lyuba was transferred to Jikei University in Tokyo, Japan, in the year 2007. Once there, a team lead by Professor Naoki Suzuki began to complete an extensive study on the carcass, including CT scans of the internal organs.

Although Lyuba has not been heard of since her transfer to Tokyo, one can only imagine how the scientific world will react if complete, undamaged DNA is found.

By the end of the decade, we might be the first humans of the 21st century to witness a live mammoth clone.

[Alexandra Y.]

I thought that I would just post a quick news compilation of facts that I have found, in case anyone else ever finds themselves wanting to know a bit about how this research is taking place. It is part of a school project for my Journalism course.

I enjoyed your logic, Lindsay. Cloning and similar scientific processes certainly are interesting to study, particularly since they are "fairly new" ideas.

[Pennant]

Um, are you taking about mimmoths?

[shrimplate]

I'm just going to go ahead and say what everyone out there must already be thinking: mammoth burgers.

Yes, I'm very ashamed.

But really, probably the only reason the American buffalo isn't extinct is because there's a market for their meat. I hate the idea, but until we stop human overpopulation and development, we will continue to lose all species of large mammals that do not serve corporate purposes.

We ourselves as a species are now completely mad enough to refer to that as "sustainability." It's nutso.

[Cass]

It seems especially bad timing to try and bring back an animal today from the last Ice Age.

[Alon Levy]

Shrimplate, there are so far three ways a country can lower its population. One is war/genocide, on the model of Cambodia. Another is epidemic disease, on the model of southern Africa. The third is a combination of easily available contraception/abortion and severe discrimination against women, on the model of Japan and Eastern Europe.

[cfrost]

Dwarfing or striking size reduction has recurred on island-stranded pachyderms many times (pdf)-
Ecology and evolution of dwarfing in insular elephants.

[cfrost]

On California’s Channel Islands where people may have killed them off (pdf)-
Channel Islands (USA) pygmy mammoths (Mammuthus exilis) compared and contrasted with M. columbi, their continental ancestral stock.

On all of the large Mediterranean islands (pdf)-
Endemic elephants of the Mediterranean Islands: knowledge, problems and perspectives.

On the Pribilof Islands where they died off quite recently, perhaps victims of polar bears. -
5,700-year-old mammoth remains from the Pribilof Islands, Alaska: last outpost of North American megafauna.

[cfrost]

Dwarfed mammoths died off only very recently on Wrangel Island off Siberia -
Holocene dwarf mammoths from Wrangel Island in the Siberian Arctic

There’s a tantalizing illustration in an ancient Egyptian tomb that suggests dwarfed elephants may have survived on one of the Mediterranean islands rather longer than thought (pdf)-
Did endemic dwarf elephants survive on Mediterranean islands up to protohistorical times?

The most completely dwarfed elephant of all lived on what is now Sicily-
The fast life of a dwarfed giant.

Sorry to post the list piecemeal, but there's no other way to feed it through the spam filter.
I'm clearly spending way too much time at work abusing library privileges reading papers on quaternary science, that have nothing really to do with what I'm supposed to be doing.

[cfrost]

The whole issue of dwarfing and gigantism in island faunas remains unsettled. -
Patterns in Insular Evolution of Mammals: A Key to Island Palaeogeography.
The island rule: made to be broken?

Folks have given some thought to what we should do with a resurrected mammoth. (pdf)-
Resurrecting the Woolly Mammoth: Science, Law, Ethics, Politics, and Religion

or whether to replace the extirpated mammoths in their ancestral home with the extant equivalents. -
Pleistocene Park: Does re-wilding North America represent sound conservation for the 21st century?

[togolosh]

I'm glad I wasn't the only one to think of the mini mammoths as soon as cloning mammoths made the news. I totally want a mini mammoth. I suspect they are pack creatures, so really you'd want a fair amount of land so you could keep maybe ten or so.

I wonder if they can be house trained.

[Abe]

People.. uhmm... It's "Woolly mammoth"?

not only it suppose to be a "mammoth" but it also lived in very cold temperature. Your living room in winter is not going to cut it.

[abe]

btw. we gonna see this more and more often as we master the technology. ( we have more pressing real philosophical/ethical issue. than current public discussion occupies)

http://science.slashdot.org/science/08/11/24/2333236.shtml

"Forget cloning a woolly mammoth — should scientists clone a Neanderthal? Such a feat should be possible soon, although it raises a number of bioethics concerns, including where to draw the line between humans and other animals."

[The Phantom]

shrimplate

The idea of eating bison meat shouldn't make anyone ashamed.

It's very healthy, much better for the environment than beef, and a number of the buffalo ranches I believe are run by Indians, providing decent jobs in an area where there are not a lot of them.

[Cass]

That's true. For one thing, bison don't emit anywhere near the same level of methane from their asses as the common cow, with all that implies for the future of our climate. There are lots more ways, though, in which cattle-grazing has been an enviromental disaster for the American west.

[The Phantom]

What I like among other things is that bison, being an intrinsically healthy animal, do not need growth hormones or the many pharmaceuticals that intensively farmed cattle get.

You just turn them loose in wild lands and they take care of themselves.

I go out of my way to find bison burgers / steaks once a month or so. I don't eat a lot of red meat, but if I eat any red meat, I want it to be bison.

[cfrost]

if I eat any red meat, I want it to be bison

Bison, it’s what’s for dinner. Lean meat, and they don’t require marbling in a feedlot - hell, they’d probably fatten on mattress stuffing. Bison is good, but I might not go as far as paleontologist R. Dale Guthrie, who made a stew out of some 36000-year-old bison meat from a frozen carcass, washed out of an Alaskan placer mine. Get the details in his book, which I can’t recommend highly enough. A Pleistocene detective story about Alaska when it was inhabited by mammoths, bison, horses, camels, horrific extinct predators, etc. If you’ve ever wondered how paleontologists reconstruct vanished landscapes with fragmentary traces of evidence, Guthrie shows how it’s done.

Re: Neanderthal clones. I see the Catholic Church is already weighing in on the subject. I don’t think we need to get our chasubles all in a bunch just yet. I can’t see anyone braving the ethical hurdles to create a fully formed living Neanderthal. (Do we use a human or chimpanzee womb to incubate the embryo?) Neanderthal stem cells, tissue culture, or hybrid cells would be another matter. I can’t imagine that would not be a pretty rich scientific vein to tap. The religious camp would still object, but I doubt they could stop it.

If any animal is resurrected from frozen arctic carcasses, my guess is it will be as a proof-of-concept experiment with something small, uncontroversial, still extant, and readily lab-cultured, like a lemming, or arctic ground squirrel. (Which animals, being small, have the added benefit of being quickly frozen before enzymatic and bacterial decay rots their DNA.) A case could be made for resurrecting black-footed ferrets. The living BF ferret is critically endangered and hanging on only by the slenderest of threads with massive life support. Frozen, mummified BF ferrets have been found in Yukon and Alaska north of the Arctic Circle and far outside of its historic range in the prairie states. As the extant ferrets are currently squeezing through an extremely narrow genetic bottleneck, it might not hurt to have some spare Pleistocene Lazarus ferrets standing by if the living ferrets become too inbred, or if they perish altogether.

[The Phantom]

cfrost

I spent much of yesterday escorting visitors to NYC's American Museum of Natural History and I thought of you.

If you've not been, I bet you'd love it to death.

[cfrost]

If you've not been, I bet you'd love it to death.

I have and I did, one far too short an afternoon too long ago. A fabulous, fabulous museum. I need to get me a temporary gig in NYC!

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Yes, cfrost, you do! Come and see us in the Big Apple.

[cfrost]

Two very NYC things impressed me about the museum. First the subway stop in the basement floor that opened onto a gigantic Pacific Northwest Indian cedar canoe. Second, one of a series of black-finished bronze busts of Africans on the staircase landings, a gorgeous, ebony goddess, naked from sternum up, who's breasts had been rubbed a gleaming gold by generations of gutter-minded boys.

[Alon Levy]

The first thing is New York-like. The second is moronic, in a way that transcends regional and national boundaries.