Baby Mammoth Found Intact

knoll99 writes "Scientists unveiled the discovery Wednesday of a baby mammoth found in the permafrost of north-west Siberia. The remains of the six-month-old female mammoth were discovered in a remarkable state of preservation on the Yamal peninsula of Russia in May, a Reuters report said. The specimen is believed to be the best of its kind to date."

Re:Tissue and fluids?

[spoco2]

Hah, you know, I was about to say "We already know what Mammoth tastes like as early explorers who found similar frozen specimens ate them"... but, well, I was wrong, no-one in modern times has to anyone's knowledge actually eaten mammoth meat [stupidquestion.net].

So, there you go, this is the best chance to find out!

And I was concerned when I read that it was being shipped to Japan that they would consider eating it, what with their terrible track record of eating endangered animals.

Re:Turkey Baster..

[John Meacham]

not at all, humans killed off mammoths in the first place, brining them back would be righting a wrong of sorts.

Of course, what I _really_ want to see brought back is the giant ground sloth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatherium [wikipedia.org]
Imagine a huge furry clawed creature the size of a bull elephant wandering around on its hind legs towering over 20 feet tall. I can't wait.

sequencing might still be possible...

[reversible physicist]

Biologists are getting good at sequencing [wikipedia.org] DNA very fast. This is done by breaking many copies of the DNA up into little overlapping pieces which are separately sequenced; then these overlapping subsequences are fit together, like a puzzle. A bunch of mostly intact DNA would be a lot like a bunch of mostly intact copies of the same puzzle. I would expect that it should be possible to get a completely correct sequence as long as the DNA in some of the cells isn't too badly damaged. They could also get a lot of help in this process from the sequences of close modern relatives. Synthesizing a complete undamaged copy of the DNA should eventually be possible. Maybe it could be done by doing search/replace using the diff's from a modern relative?

more pictures pls?? post links here.

[rrobles]

I want to share this discovery with my children which are very interested in dinosaurs and past forms of life that populated the earth ages ago.

I'd like to have more pictures than the currently released.

If you find a good source of pictures please reply to this post. Thanks.

I can tell that they are going to be very excited about this!!

and they will ask me tons of questions! =:-|

In Soviet Russia. ... (no, no YOU involved)

[gomiam]

...Pravda would have commented that the mammoth was so well preserved that the ones who found it were able to avidly eat its meat. And few would wonder what drives someone to eat raw unfrozen mammoth meat.

With apologies to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag archipelago".

Re:it's not that mysterious what caused extinction

[DougWebb]

There was a massive extinction of larger animals in North America 10,000 years ago, coincident with a new migration of people across the Siberian land bridge. Giant sloth, cave bear, sabertooth, mastodon, etc. were wiped out.

Also coincident with the end of the ice age environment these species were adapted to. The humans back then probably scavenged more than they hunted; easy pickings.

Also, one has to wonder why the buffalo, the moose, and the deer, which replaced the ice age herbivores in North America, weren't wiped out by human over-hunting. They seem a lot easier to kill than mastodon. Maybe it's because humans didn't start over-hunting other species until we developed guns?