Mammoth Genome, Cloning and Bringing It Back to Life | Early European History And Religion

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BRINGING A WOOLLY MAMMOTH BACK TO LIFE?

In the 1980s, Kagoshima University professor Kazufumi Goto suggested it was possible to produce a living Woolly mammoth by: 1) breeding a mammoth (using its sperm from a mammoth to fertilize the egg of Asian elephant and repeatedly breeding the offspring to get an animal closer and closer to a mammoth; and 2) cloning a mammoth using DNA taken from a part of a mammoth and fusing it in the egg of an Asia elephant that has been stripped of its elephant genes so the baby would be a mammoth not a hybrid.

Olivia Judson wrote in New York Times: The outline of how to stage a resurrection is clear. In essence, it’s a matter of cross-species cloning — using an egg from one species to host the genome of the other. The procedure is more or less the same as for regular cloning. First, you make a “blank” egg by removing the egg’s nucleus — this contains the egg’s genome. You then insert the genome of the animal you want to clone. In regular cloning, the genome is from the same species as the egg. In cross-species cloning, the genome and egg are from different species. So, for mammoths, you’d put mammoth DNA into a blank elephant egg, and transplant the egg into an elephant surrogate mother. For Neanderthals, you’d put Neanderthal DNA into a blank human egg, and have a human surrogate mother (or, one day, perhaps, an artificial womb). For a bird like a dodo, you’d put dodo DNA into a blank pigeon egg and pop the egg into an incubator. Easy peasy. [Source: Olivia Judson, New York Times, November 25, 2008]

In 1990, Goto led a team that produced a healthy calf using the sperm from a dead bull. In 1996, Goto began his search for male Woolly mammoths with sperm-fill reproductive organs near Yakutsk, Siberia, where numerous frozen Woolly mammoths have been found. The chance of finding DNA intact in frozen mammoth sperm is still very remote. Goto has offer $10,000 for mammoth tissue with intact DNA. If a viable embryo is produced it will shipped after five cell divisions to a lab in Thailand at Mahidol university, which has successfully fertilized Asian elephant eggs in vitro. The embryo would then be implanted in a surrogate and ideally emerge as a Woolly mammoth 600 days later.

New research announced in the late 1990s suggested that the idea of bringing a Woolly mammoth back to life may be not as far-fetched as once thought. At that time about 80 percent of the mammoth genome has been pieced together from samples taken from two carcasses found in Siberia. Among the discoveries related to this is that mammoth are much more closely related to modern elephants than previously thought.

As of the mid 2010s there were at least three separate teams trying to recreate the mammoth and several researchers at universities. Cross-species cloning has been tried and been successful. Two African wildcat kitten clones have been born from domestic cats, and three gray wolf clones have been born from domestic dogs. The rates have been high. To get the three wolves, 372 embryos were transferred into surrogate mothers. The wildcats were even worse: 1,552 embryos were transferred, but only two healthy kittens were born (in all, 17 were born, but 7 were born dead and 8 died shortly after birth).

Challenges of Bringing a Mammoth Back to Life

Olivia Judson wrote in New York Times: In the decade since Dolly the Sheep was cloned, enormous progress has been made on regular cloning. As of 2008, more than 10 different species of mammal have been cloned, including ferrets, rabbits, horses, cows and pigs. Nonetheless, success rates are still extremely low. Even for cows, the animals that have been cloned the most, fewer than 5 percent of embryos transferred to surrogate mothers result in offspring. A recent report on dog clones illustrates the problem: of 358 embryos transplanted into 20 females, two pregnancies became established, and only one puppy was born. The reasons for the failures are many and various. Sometimes the embryos don’t grow. Sometimes the placenta goes wrong. Many clones are stillborn, or born with gross abnormalities. In short, despite the successes, cloning is still far from being reliable or routine. Cloning a mammoth would be even more difficult. For one thing, elephants and mammoths are less closely related to each other than cats and wildcats or dogs and wolves, so the difficulties would likely be greater in any case. And elephants have a 22-month pregnancy — so you’d have to wait a long time to find out whether the experiment had worked.[Source: Olivia Judson, New York Times, November 25, 2008]

One of the biggest obstacle to overcome in bringing mammoths back from extinction is getting a mammoth cell into good enough shape to inject into a an egg. In most cloning cases a cell is taken from a live animal and injected into the egg. Obviously things are different with a cell taken from a mammoth carcass that as been sitting around for 10,000 years. Instead do being neatly arranged the chromosome are in little pieces and they will have to be reconstructed, something that is far beyond the reach of today's science.

According to iflscience.com: Since many mammoths in frozen parts of the world, when they died their bodies sometimes became encased in permafrost, which largely shielded them from decomposition and the hungry mouths of predators and scavengers. This has meant that some remarkably well-preserved specimens have been recovered as the ice has thawed and revealed their resting place, some of which could be 40,000 years old. But while they may look pretty intact, the same cannot be said for their genomes since DNA degrades over time, a process that is accelerated by the presence of microbes and water. [Source:iflscience.com, March 23, 2015]

Although scientists have managed to find fragments of mammoth DNA from frozen cells, which raised the possibility they could be stitched back together, they have so far failed to find enough to perform cloning experiments. While some scientists have therefore ruled out using this technique to bring mammoths back from extinction, all hope may not be lost as some think it is possible to merge genes taken from preserved specimens with those of their closest living relative — the Asian elephant.

Getting Closer to Resurrecting a Mammoth

In January 2011 it was announced that a team of researchers would make a serious attempt to bring back to life a mammoth species using new cloning technologies after obtaining tissue from the carcass of a mammoth preserved in a Russian mammoth research laboratory. "Preparations to realize this goal have been made," Prof. Akira Iritani, leader of the team and a professor emeritus of Kyoto University, told the Yomiuri Shimbun. The Yomiuri Shimbun, “Under the plan, the nuclei of mammoth cells will be inserted into an elephant's egg cells from which the nuclei have been removed to create an embryo containing mammoth genes. The embryo will then be inserted into an elephant's womb in the hope that the animal will give birth to a baby mammoth." [Source: Yomiuri Shimbun, January 13, 2011]

Researchers from Kinki University's Graduate School of Biology-Oriented Science and Technology began the study in 1997. On three occasions, the team obtained mammoth skin and muscle tissue excavated in good condition from the permafrost in Siberia. However, most nuclei in the cells were damaged by ice crystals and were unusable. The plan to clone a mammoth was abandoned.

In 2008, Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama of Kobe's Riken Center for Developmental Biology succeeded in cloning a mouse from the cells of mouse that had been kept in deep-freeze for 16 years. The achievement was the first in the world but no other laboratory replicated those supposed results. and the research was viewed as flawed. But based on Wakayama's techniques, Iritani's team devised a technique to extract the nuclei of eggs — only 2 percent to 3 percent are in good condition — without damaging them.

In the spring of 2010, the team invited Minoru Miyashita, a professor of Kinki University who was once head of Osaka's Tennoji Zoo, to participate in the project. He asked zoos across the nation to donate elephant egg cells when their female elephants died. The team also invited the head of the Russian mammoth research laboratory and two U.S. African elephant researchers as guest professors to the university. The research became a joint effort by Japan, Russia and the United States. If a cloned mammoth embryo can be created, Miyashita and the U.S. researchers, who are experts in animal in vitro fertilization, will be responsible for transplanting the embryo into an African elephant. The team told the Yomiuri Shimbun if everything goes as planned, a mammoth will be born in five to six years. "If a cloned embryo can be created, we need to discuss, before transplanting it into the womb, how to breed [the mammoth] and whether to display it to the public," Iritani said. "After the mammoth is born, we'll examine its ecology and genes to study why the species became extinct and other factors."

In 2019, a team with Akira Iritani, then 90, announced that they had harvested fairly intact cells from a mammoth and had some success bring them back to life. The cells came from Yuka, a mammoth found frozen in Siberia in 2010. “We recovered the less-damaged nucleus-like structures from the remains and visualised their dynamics in living mouse oocytes after nuclear transfer,” the researchers wrote in a paper published in Scientific Reports. BGR reported: The scientists took the heart of the “dormant,” but damaged, mammoth cells and swapped them into living mouse reproductive cells in a process called nuclear transfer (NT). Against all odds, the cells began to wake back up, bringing a tiny bit of a woolly mammoth back to life. However, as promising as this might sound, it’s a far cry from actually reviving the extinct species. For that that happen scientists would neeed to find woolly mammoth with DNA that has held up better over time. And NT techniques do supply enough genetic material for cloning and resurrecting an animal. “Although the results presented here clearly show us again the de facto impossibility to clone the mammoth by current NT technology, our approach paves the way for evaluating the biological activities of nuclei in extinct animal species,” the team says. [Source: Mike Wehner, bgr,com, March 18,, 2019]

Mammoth Genome Sequenced

In April 2015, scientists announced that they had sequenced the complete genome of the woolly mammoth using DNA obtained by drilling into mammoth tusks and other remains, researchers now have the extinct creatures' complete genetic code. The genome study has been published in the journal Current Biology. Dr Love Dalén, at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, told BBC News that the first ever publication of the full DNA sequence of the mammoth could help those trying to bring the creature back to life. [Source: Pallab Ghosh, BBC News, 23 April 2015]

Dr Dalén and his colleagues sequenced the mammoth genome in order to learn more about what happened when the creature went extinct around 4,000 years ago on Russia's Wrangel Island. They compared the DNA of one of the last creatures to have lived with one that lived 45,000 The study showed that the population on Wrangel Island was so small that the animals became inbred for the last 5,000 years of their existence. Dr Dalén cannot say categorically that inbreeding was the cause or contributed to their eventual demise because it doesn't always have a negative effect, but he thinks that his study makes this a distinct possibility. years ago when mammoths were more commonplace. The genetic data also showed there were two major population declines, one some 300,000 years ago and another around 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age.

In 2008, scientists announced that they had deciphered much of the genetic code of the woolly mammoth, the first time researchers had spelled out the DNA of an extinct species. Seth Borenstein of Associated Press wrote: “The million-dollar mammoth study resulted in a first draft of the animal's genome, detailing the ice age creature's more than 3 billion DNA building blocks. The research published in the journal Nature also gives scientists new clues about evolution and extinction. “To obtain the DNA, scientists relied on 20 balls of mammoth hair found frozen in the Siberian permafrost. The new study, which is about 80 percent complete, provides a letter-by-letter genetic code mapping out most of the mammoth's DNA. Think of it as an instruction sheet on how to build a mammoth.|[Source: Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, November 19, 2008]

“Elephants and mammoths diverged along evolutionary paths about 6 million years ago, about the same time humans and chimps did, Schuster said. But there are twice as many differences between the genetic makeup of chimps and humans as those between elephants and mammoths. "Primates evolved twice as fast as elephants," Schuster said. But some animals such as rodents have had even more evolutionary changes, indicating that their development might have to do with size or metabolism, said study co-author Webb Miller. Another interesting finding: In the species with mostly mapped genomes, there are certain areas where the genetic code is exactly the same in all the animals — except the mammoth.In other animals, these proteins "stayed the same for a very long time," said Miller, professor of biology and computer science at Penn State. "I don't know what it means. All I did was find them." Miller and Schuster noticed that most of the mammoths they examined had far less genetic diversity than other species still alive, and that may also give a clue to the biology of extinction. So the two are also applying what they learned from the Siberian behemoth to their other efforts to help save Australia's endangered Tasmanian devil, which has the same lack of genetic diversity.

Mammoth Genome Provides Basis for Mammoth Cloning

Seth Borenstein of Associated Press wrote: “The Woolly mammoth genome sequencing “project marks the first time researchers have spelled out the DNA of an extinct species, and it raised the possibility that other ancient animals such as mastodons and sabertooth tigers might someday walk the Earth again. "It could be done. The question is, just because we might be able to do it one day, should we do it?" asked Stephan Schuster, a Penn State University biochemist and co-author of the new research. "I would be surprised to see if it would take more than 10 or 20 years to do it." [Source: Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, November 19, 2008 ||||]

“Schuster said researchers should someday be able to recreate any extinct creature that lived within the last 100,000 years as long as it got trapped in permafrost and had hair. That leaves out the Jurassic period, the time of dinosaurs, from about 140 million to 200 million years ago. So Earth's real-life sequel to extinction is far more likely to be "Ice Age 3" than "Jurassic Park IV." In 2005, “Japanese scientists said they hoped to find frozen mammoth sperm and impregnate an elephant and raise the offspring in a safari park in Siberia. But using genetics to engineer a mammoth makes more sense, Schuster said. ||||

“Anthropology professor Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said he no longer considers such ideas impossible. Poinar, who wasn't part of Schuster's study but consulted on the movie "Jurassic Park," said director Steven Spielberg may have had it right when he told skeptical scientists: "This is the science of eventuality." ||||

“There are two possible ways to use this new genetic map to make a mammoth, and both involve creating a mammoth embryo and implanting it into its elephant cousin. Both methods are incredibly complex and rely on intricate genetic manipulation because the mammoth DNA is not suitable for cloning. One approach requires scientists to start with an elephant cell and genetically engineer it to match the DNA code of a mammoth.The other method involves synthetic biology in which scientists would create life forms from scratch. Once this technique is developed — and leaders in the field say it is just three to 10 years away — scientists would follow the mammoth recipe to build a mammoth cell. An easier option would be to examine what makes the mammoth different from its closest cousin, the African elephant, and create a hairy hybrid to sit in zoos. "People would like to see a hairy elephant," said George Church, director of computational genomics at Harvard Medical School.” ||||

Mammoth DNA Successfully Inserted Into Elephant Genome

In March 2015 scientists at Harvard University building that they had successfully inserted genes from the woolly mammoth into the genome of an elephant. iflscience.com reported: While this may represent significant progress in the field, lead researcher George Church has reportedly played down claims that the work brings us closer to recreating these iconic animals. [Source:iflscience.com, March 23, 2015]

Church began by analyzing the DNA isolated from mammoth specimens and comparing it to that of the Asian elephant, searching for genes that separated them from their relatives. Next, they made exact copies of these stretches of DNA before using a fairly new gene-editing technique to make precise cuts in the elephant genome and insert the desired mammoth genes.

“We prioritized genes associated with cold resistance including hairiness, ear size, subcutaneous fat and, especially, hemoglobin [the molecule in red blood cells that transports oxygen around the body]” Church told the Sunday Times. “We now have functioning elephant cells with mammoth DNA in them. We have not published it in a scientific journal because there is more work to do, but we plan to do so.”

Long Now Foundation

The Long Now Foundation, an organisation based in San Francisco, is attempting to resurrect the mammoth. On its website, it says its ultimate goal is "to produce new mammoths that are capable of repopulating the vast tracts of tundra and boreal forest in Eurasia and North America. The goal is not to make perfect copies of extinct woolly mammoths, but to focus on the mammoth adaptations needed for Asian elephants to live in the cold climate of the tundra.[Source: Pallab Ghosh, BBC News, 23 April 2015]

According to the BBC: The foundation is supporting a team based at Harvard University, which is using genetic engineering techniques to insert mammoth genes into living elephant cells. So far, the foundation says it has placed mammoth genes involved in blood, fat and hair into elephant stem cells in order to study the effects of these genes. The researchers hope to produce mammoth red blood cells to see how much oxygen they might have carried and so learn more about the physiology of the animals. Similar tests, they claim, can be done to investigate how their fat and hair grew.

The Long Now Foundation's stated aim is to insert synthetically created mammoth genetic material inside an elephant egg, which it would then place in a zoo elephant. It believes that cloning attempts can begin by 2018.Many experts, however, believe that there are considerable obstacles in the way of creating a mammoth in this way. Among them is Prof Beth Shapiro, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has written a book called How to Clone a Mammoth. "There is an enormous difference between having a cell living in a dish in a lab whose genome contains a few changes and having a living animal that is a little bit mammoth-like," she told BBC News. "We'd have to use that cell to create an embryo, get an embryo into a maternal host, and establish a pregnancy and hope that pregnancy was successful."

Sooam Biotech

Carl Zimmer wrote in National Geographic: “armed with the new cloning technologies, researchers at the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in Seoul have teamed up with mammoth experts from North-Eastern Federal University in the Siberian city of Yakutsk.” In the summer of 2012 “they traveled up the Yana River, drilling tunnels into the frozen cliffs along the river with giant hoses. In one of those tunnels they found chunks of mammoth tissue, including bone marrow, hair, skin, and fat. [Source: Carl Zimmer, National Geographic, April 2013]

“The tissue is now in Seoul, where the Sooam scientists are examining it. “If we dream about it, the ideal case would be finding a viable cell, a cell that’s alive,” says Sooam’s Insung Hwang, who organized the Yana River expedition. If the Sooam researchers do find such a cell, they could coax it to produce millions of cells. These could be reprogrammed to grow into embryos, which could then be implanted in surrogate elephants, the mammoth’s closest living relatives.

“Most scientists doubt that any living cell could have survived freezing on the open tundra. But Hwang and his colleagues have a Plan B: capture an intact nucleus of a mammoth cell, which is far more likely to have been preserved than the cell itself. Cloning a mammoth from nothing but an intact nucleus, however, will be a lot trickier. The Sooam researchers will need to transfer the nucleus into an elephant egg that has had its own nucleus removed. This will require harvesting eggs from an elephant—a feat no one has yet accomplished. If the DNA inside the nucleus is well preserved enough to take control of the egg, it just might start dividing into a mammoth embryo. If the scientists can get past that hurdle, they still have the formidable task of transplanting the embryo into an elephant’s womb. Then, as Zimov cautions, they will need patience. If all goes well, it will still be almost two years before they can see if the elephant will give birth to a healthy mammoth. “The thing that I always say is, if you don’t try, how would you know that it’s impossible?” says Hwang.”

The “genome-retooling method could theoretically work on any species with a close living relative and a genome capable of being reconstructed. So even if the Sooam team fails to find an intact mammoth nucleus, someone might still bring the species back. Scientists already have the technology for reconstructing most of the genes it takes to make a mammoth, which could be inserted into an elephant stem cell. And there is no shortage of raw material for further experiments emerging from the Siberian permafrost. “With mammoths, it’s really a dime a dozen up there,” says Hendrik Poinar, an expert on mammoth DNA at McMaster University in Ontario. “It’s just a matter of finances now.” Though the revival of a mammoth or a passenger pigeon is no longer mere fantasy, the reality is still years away. For another extinct species, the time frame may be much shorter. Indeed, there’s at least a chance it may be back among the living before this story is published.”

Colossal — the Company That Brought Back Dire Wolves

The biosciences firm Colossal claims it brought back dire wolves from extinction and aims to use gene-editing techniques to bring back wooly mammoths AFP reported in 2021: “Colossal, capitalizing on a partnership with a Harvard geneticist, said its species "de-extinction" effort has the potential to anchor a working model for restoring damaged or lost ecosystems and thereby help slow or even halt the effects of climate change. "Never before has humanity been able to harness the power of this technology to rebuild ecosystems, heal our Earth and preserve its future through the repopulation of extinct animals," Colossal chief executive and co-founder Ben Lamm, an emerging technology entrepreneur, said. "In addition to bringing back ancient extinct species like the woolly mammoth, we will be able to leverage our technologies to help preserve critically endangered species that are on the verge of extinction and restore animals where humankind had a hand in their demise." [Source: AFP, September 14, 2021]

For decades, scientists have been recovering bits and pieces of mammoth tusks, bones, teeth and hair to extract and try to sequence the mammoth's DNA. Colossal says it aims to insert DNA sequences of woolly mammoths, collected from well-preserved remains in the permafrost and frozen steppes, into the genome of Asian elephants, to create an "elephant-mammoth hybrid." Asian elephants and woolly mammoths share a 99.6 percent similar DNA makeup, Colossal says on its website.

“Company co-founder George Church is a renowned geneticist and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, who is using pioneering techniques, including CRISPR technology, to advance species de-extinction. "Technologies discovered in pursuit of this grand vision — a living, walking proxy of a woolly mammoth — could create very significant opportunities in conservation and beyond," Church said. The woolly mammoth's vast migration patterns were seen as critical to preserving the Arctic region's environmental health. Colossal says restoring the beasts has the potential to revitalize the Arctic grasslands, a vast region with major climate change-combatting properties, such as carbon sequestering and methane suppression. Colossal is funded in part through a $15 million seed round from investors and says its advisors include leaders in bioethics and genomics.

Blood-Oozing Mammoth Carcass — Good Enough to Supply DNA for Cloning?

In May 2013, scientists from the Siberian Northeastern Federal University ventured to remote and city Maly Lyakhovsky Island in the far where they unearthed an almost complete mammoth, with three legs, most of the body, part of the head and the trunk still intact. During excavations, the carcass oozed a dark red liquid that turned out to be mammoth blood. Once freed of the permafrost, the mammoth meat was reportedly fresh enough that one of the scientists took a bite of it. "This is definitely one of the best samples people have ever found," Insung Hwang, a cloning scientist at the SOOAM Biotech Research Center, said. The researchers then took the carcass to Yakutsk in Russia, where a group of experts had just three days to thoroughly examine the specimen before it was refrozen to prevent rotting. [Source: Tia Ghose, LiveScience on November 17, 2014]

Tia Ghose wrote in LiveScience: The team used carbon dating to determine that the female mammoth, nicknamed Buttercup, lived about 40,000 years ago. Tests conducted on the mammoth's teeth revealed it was likely in its mid-50s. Based on growth rates from the tusks, the team deduced that the mammoth had also successfully weaned eight calves and lost one baby. Feces and bacteria in the intestines revealed the ancient matriarch ate grassland plants such as buttercups and dandelions.

Tooth marks on her bones helped the scientists glean information about Buttercup's grisly end. The mammoth had become trapped in a peat bog and was eaten alive from the back by predators such as wolves. While scientists probed the elbow of the mammoth, the large beast oozed more blood. Chemical analyses revealed that the blood cells were broken, but still contained hemoglobin, or oxygen-ferrying molecules. Unlike humans and other mammals, mammoths evolved a cold-resistant form of hemoglobin that could survive at the near-freezing temperatures present during the Ice Age. "The fact that blood has been found is promising for us, because it just tells us how good of a condition the mammoth was kept in for 43,000 years," Hwang said.

DNA is fragile and must be stored at low temperatures and in uniform humidity to stay intact. Past mammoth carcasses have looked exceptionally well-preserved, with some even yielding a preserved mammoth brain. Others have oozed what looked like blood, but ultimately did not have enough DNA to recreate the mammoth genome and clone it.

Arguments Against the De-Extinction of Mammoths

Prof Beth Shapiro, University of California, Santa Cruz Shapiro is opposed to what is known in the field as "mammoth de-extinction". She told the BBC: "Elephants do not fare well in captivity, struggle with assisted reproduction, and should be allowed to make more elephants. "Secondly, elephants are highly social creatures and there is no reason to suspect that mammoths were not. One mammoth would be necessarily alone in the world. It could not be released into the freedom of the Arctic until there were many of them. Until we can make many mammoths without using elephants, to my mind it is ethically unsound." [Source: Pallab Ghosh, BBC News, 23 April 2015]

“Mammoths, like elephants, were intelligent, highly social animals,” Adrian Lister, paleontologist and mammoth expert at the Natural History Museum in London, told National Geographic . “Cloning would give you a single animal, which would live all alone in a park, a zoo, or a lab — not in its native habitat, which no longer exists. You re basically creating a curio.” Tom Gilbert, an expert in ancient DNA at Copenhagen University who with Schuster and Webb pioneered the harvesting of mammoth DNA from hair, told National Geographic that as a student of mammoths, he’d be the first to go see one trundle across a paddock. But he questions both the utility and the wisdom of cloning extinct species. “If you can do a mammoth, you can do anything else that’s dead, including your grandmother. But in a world in global warming and with limited resources for research, do you really want to bring back your dead grandmother?” [Source: Tom Mueller, National Geographic, May 2009]

Nirmal Narayanan wrote in the International Business Times: “As the news of recreating mammoths and other extinct creatures surfaced online, sceptics have lashed out against the move arguing that it is against nature's law. As per these sceptics, this plan is basically anthropocentric. They believe that the mammoths created using cloning would serve no other purpose apart from remaining as an exhibit for human beings.“Change in the ecosystem is another possible side effect of bringing back extinct animals. It should be noted that mammoths have roamed on the earth during the ice age, but now the climate has changed, and the planet is getting warmer day by day. [Source: Nirmal Narayanan, International Business Times, December 4, 2019]

Recognizing that there are obviously a large number of ethical concerns regarding bringing an extinct animal back to life, Church argues that reintroducing these animals into ecosystems in Russia could actually have a positive impact on Siberian permafrost, which is gradually receding with climate change. However, not everyone shares his views and others think time and money would be better spent conserving animals that we still have. [Source: iflscience.com, March 23, 2015]

Recreating the Mammoth Steppe

Sergey Zimov, a Russian ecologist and director of the Northeast Science Station in Cherskiy in the Republic of Sakha in northern Siberia, told The New Yorker: We are not trying exactly to reconstruct the mammoth steppe ecosystem, because we don’t have the mammoth. But we are trying to reconstruct the highly productive steppe ecosystem.”

Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in The New Yorker: “Zimov brought in reindeer and a breed of very cold-hardy horses known as Yakutians. A few years ago, he imported five European bison to the park, but only one—a male—survived the second winter. “Now we are looking for girlfriends,” Zimov said. Several musk oxen were also brought in, but they, too, were all males. “We also search females for them,” Zimov told me. The Pleistocene Park, which is in northeastern Siberia, is so remote that almost no one who isn’t conducting research there has ever visited it.” [Source: Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, December 24 & 31, 2012 ||*||]

Carl Zimmer wrote in National Geographic: Zimov “has long argued that this was no coincidence: The mammoths and numerous herbivores maintained the grassland by breaking up the soil and fertilizing it with their manure. Once they were gone, moss took over and transformed the grassland into less productive tundra. [Source: Carl Zimmer, National Geographic, April 2013]

“In recent years Zimov has tried to turn back time on the tundra by bringing horses, muskoxen, and other big mammals to a region of Siberia he calls Pleistocene Park. And he would be happy to have woolly mammoths roam free there. “But only my grandchildren will see them,” he says. “A mouse breeds very fast. Mammoths breed very slow. Be prepared to wait.”

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFPand various books and other publications.

Last updated May 2025