DNA of Woolly Mammoth Fully Sequenced

jd writes "Scientists have decoded the mitochondrial DNA of the Woolly Mammoth. According to the article: 'the Mammoth was most closely related to the Asian elephant rather than the African Elephant. The three groups split from a common ancestor about six million years ago, with Asian elephants and mammoths diverging about half a million years later.' This work is tied into efforts by researchers to use DNA to analyze other extinct species, such as the cave bear, the Haast eagle and the American lion. The novel aspect of this latest work is that it involved stitching together almost 50 fragments of mtDNA in order to obtain the sequence as a whole."

Embryos

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure if mammuth sperm [wikipedia.org] would be capable to fertilise elephants.. but could they produce embryos [wikipedia.org] from the dna, and ultimately make those sweet hairy babies with asian elephants?

I wanna have my Furry Park!

Re:Incorrect title (again)

[1u3hr]

we won't be seeing Jurasic park any time soon.

In this case, that would be Pleistocene Park.

Re:I plead innocent

[BWJones]

Perhaps I am a little slow on the uptake, but I just realized that we are all simple pawns in the evil scheme of the Slashdot editors. We submit articles for publication on Slashdot, the editors screw with our submission to get all of us all fired about how crummy the editing is, or how stupid we think the submitters are or merely to pontificate on how smart we think we happen to be. But here is the deal.....it all drives traffic . Sometimes I feel so stupid......why did I not see this before? :-)

Re:Can Jurrasic Park be a reality...

[LordLucless]

Because otherwise the dinosaurs wouldnt have been able to grow dicks, the chaos maths guy would have been wrong and the whole point of the story would suddenly vanish.

Re:Mammoths evolve? wait a sec...

[LnxAddct]

The funny thing is, they have been proven wrong. Look at dogs and wolves. Or a much better example. If you take a certain species of squirrel from Pennsylvania and mate it with one in Ohio, fertile offspring will be produced. Take this same squirrel and mate it with one of the same species from California and no fertile offspring will be produced. This species is literally on the border of speciation and there are plenty of other species of animals to reference as well. Unfortunately I can't think of the squirrel's species name off the tope of my head, but if you google around you'll find examples.
Regards,
Steve

Lives of the Cell

[Tony]

This is described beautifully by Lewis Thomas in his essay, "Lives of the Cell." In it, he points out that complex cells are like carriers for bacteria-- in plants, the chloroplasts; and in animals, the mitochondira. We're just a fancy car to tote around and protect billions of bacteria (not even including the free bacteria in our bellies). The energy they produce (chloroplasts) and release (mitochondria) drive all other life. It's like we're just evolutionary curliques to move forward the evolution of bacteria.

Kinda cool thought, even if it's not perfect.