Man vs. mammoth: Is a face-off like this in our future...again?
Courtesy redskunkScientists are another step closer to making Jurassic Park a reality. Well, not quite Jurassic Park, but certainly Pleistocene Park.

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University have decoded 80 percent of the DNA for the woolly mammoth, an elephant ancestor that went extinct about 10,000 years ago. The results of their study appear in the journal Nature.

The DNA was extracted from actual mammoth hair found preserved in the permafrost of Siberia. Hair encapsulates DNA, providing a purer source of the genetic material than that found in fossil bones that are vulnerable to contamination by bacteria and other creatures involved in decomposition. We covered this in a previous post.

About six million years of evolution separate the wooly mammoth from its modern descendents the Indian and African elephants. And so far they appear genetically to be very similar, although a complete assessment of differences won’t be available until the complete genomes of mammoths and modern elephants are mapped. The data sets for each is comprised of about 4 billion DNA bases.

But even then you don’t have to worry about rogue mammoths running amok on the interstates (have you ever hit a moose? Multiply that experience by about 15). Science is still decades away from cloning an actual specimen – or even a hybrid with a living elephant - from the genetic material. The technology just isn’t there yet. But that’s not the only thing in the way.

"It could be done,” said co-author Stephan Schuster, a biochemistry professor at Penn State. “The question is, just because we might be able to do it one day, should we do it?"

Sounds familiar doesn’t it? The same question was posed by one of the characters in Michael Crichton's book Jurassic Park just before things got really hairy.

SOURCES and LINKS

Penn State's mammoth research page
Live Science story
Previous Buzz story on mammoth cloning

Tags : DNA, mammoth, cloning, extinct, extinction, Jurassic Park, ethics, genetics

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A wizard and his moa skeleton: Oh, the adventures they have together.
Courtesy wikimedia commonsBut, then again, some people think a lot of things.

And, just to be clear here, we aren’t talking about the giant mall thing in Bloomington. We’re talking about the giant extinct bird thing in New Zealand.

The Moa were, in fact, the most giant of bird things, with some species reaching 12 or 13 feet in height. All species (scientists think that there were about 15) were entirely flightless. They are thought to have survived up until around 1500, before being hunted to extinction. According to some (most).

It would be awfully difficult, you’d think, to miss a bunch of 13-foot-tall birds strolling around the island. Yet some cryptozoologists persistently claim that a population of moa remains on New Zealand, and recent photos taken in Fiorland, New Zealand, supposedly showing new moa foot prints and a “1.8 m-plus tall bird” have got them all excited again.

Unfortunately, the photos were sold for $350 dollars on the internet, and have not been released.

I don’t knoa about this one…

Tags : birds, cryptozoology, extinct, Moa

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