Scientists have thus far cloned sheep, mice, cats, horses and even a water buffalo, but now they want to clone a woolly mammoth. They also think they’ll be able to clone said mammoth within five years, all owing to a recovered thigh bone that has well-preserved bone marrow from permafrost soil in Siberia.

Even though the woolly mammoth became extinct some 10 000 years ago, scientists with the Russian Sakha Republic’s mammoth museum and the Japanese Kinki (no spice) University are going to launch a joint research project next year to reproduce the giant mammal.

Japan’s Kyodo News reported from Yakutsk, Russia, that by replacing the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant with those taken from the mammoth’s marrow cells, embryos with mammoth DNA can be produced.

From there, scientists will plant the embryos into elephant wombs for delivery, as the two species are closely related enough for the gestation process to work.

Global warming has thawed ground in regions like eastern Russia where the ground is usually permanently frozen, and this has led to the discovery of a number of frozen mammoths in recent years.

Since the early 1990’s, the challenge for scientists has been to find mammoth nuclei with undamaged mammoth genes – something they now have.

[Source: DailyMail]