Scientists Are Reincarnating the Woolly Mammoth to Return in 4 Years

[Barrister]

Yeah, there's nothing to "recover" from. Nature doesn't have a default state it goes back to, it evolves and changes over time and animal and plants must adapt to it.

I mean 10,000 years ago North America was mostly covered in glaciers.  Mammoths lived in the not-ice-covered bits like Beringia.

[Valmy]

What kind of recovery do you have in mind?

I presume replacing it with another mega fauna to fill its niche? That is the only conjecture I can think of.

So maybe the idea is despite being extinct for thousands of years whatever role the Mammoth played can still be ecologically beneficial since nothing has replaced it?

But I am much more interested in the idea of quickly reintroducing recently extinct species into areas where their habitat still exists.

[crazy canuck]

But I am much more interested in the idea of quickly reintroducing recently extinct species into areas where their habitat still exists.

Yeah, the reintroduction of Wolves into Yellowstone provides a good example of the benefits.

[Razgovory]

Do we have the spear technology if we need to make them extinct again?

[crazy canuck]

Do we have the spear technology if we need to make them extinct again?

Spears yes, what is limited are the people with enough strength, stamina and skill to use them properly.

[viper37]

Yeah, there's nothing to "recover" from. Nature doesn't have a default state it goes back to, it evolves and changes over time and animal and plants must adapt to it.

The Canadians prairies have changed substantially after the near extinction of the bisons.  I am uncertain our farmers would be happy at seeing roaming herds of bisons everywhere in their fields now...

[viper37]

Do we have the spear technology if we need to make them extinct again?

Spears yes, what is limited are the people with enough strength, stamina and skill to use them properly.

Looking at the internet, there is no shortage of Republican-minded people who believe in the Spartan ideal of society.  I say if need be, we start with them.  Give them spears and send them mammoth hunting like a true North American Spartan would do.

[The Larch]

Yeah, there's nothing to "recover" from. Nature doesn't have a default state it goes back to, it evolves and changes over time and animal and plants must adapt to it.

The Canadians prairies have changed substantially after the near extinction of the bisons.  I am uncertain our farmers would be happy at seeing roaming herds of bisons everywhere in their fields now...

And what does that have to do with what I said?

[Razgovory]

I'm concerned that mammoths are dead for a reason.  Like the dodo, the mammoth could be a danger to our way of life.

[Sheilbh]

Incidentally different mammoth project I think but I regularly think about this Atlantic article from a few years ago about bringing them back:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/pleistocene-park/517779/
Especially this bit:

Climate change may have played a supporting role in these extinctions, but as our inventory of fossils has grown, it has strengthened the case for extermination by human rampage. Most telling is the timeline. Between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago, during an ocean-lowering glaciation, a small group of humans set out on a sea voyage from Southeast Asia. In only a few thousand years, they skittered across Indonesia and the Philippines, until they reached Papua New Guinea and Australia, where they found giant kangaroos, lizards twice as long as Komodo dragons, and furry, hippo-size wombats that kept their young in huge abdominal pouches. Estimating extinction dates is tricky, but most of these species seem to have vanished shortly thereafter.

It took at least another 20,000 years for human beings to trek over the Bering land bridge to the Americas, and a few thousand more to make it down to the southern tip. The journey seems to have taken the form of an extended hunting spree. Before humans arrived, the Americas were home to mammoths, bear-size beavers, car-size armadillos, giant camels, and a bison species twice as large as those that graze the plains today. The smaller, surviving bison is now the largest living land animal in the Americas, and it barely escaped extermination: The invasion of gun-toting Europeans reduced its numbers from more than 30 million to fewer than 2,000.

The pattern that pairs human arrival with megafaunal extinction is clearest in the far-flung islands that no human visited until relatively recently. The large animals of Hawaii, Madagascar, and New Zealand disappeared during the past 2,000 years, usually within centuries of human arrival. This pattern even extends to ocean ecosystems. As soon as industrial shipbuilding allowed large groups of humans to establish a permanent presence on the seas, we began hunting marine megafauna for meat and lamp oil. Less than a century later, North Atlantic gray whales were gone, along with 95 percent of North Atlantic humpbacks. Not since the asteroid struck have large animals found it so difficult to survive on planet Earth.

[grumbler]

The conclusion that megafauna were wiped out by humans as their environments became more human-friendly (and humans developed things like sewing that let them prosper in colder climates) is not, insofar as I know, at all controversial.  Humans are incredibly efficient hunters.

[Razgovory]

The conclusion that megafauna were wiped out by humans as their environments became more human-friendly (and humans developed things like sewing that let them prosper in colder climates) is not, insofar as I know, at all controversial.  Humans are incredibly efficient hunters.

There are those who want to emphasis climate change as the primary cause of the extinction.  Personally, I don't buy it.  Climate Change didn't stop at the ocean and wait until people developed boats to get to Cuba before it wiped out the mega fauna there.  I've even seen the claim that comet hit North America and destroyed the mega fauna rather than the obvious answer:  Human beings over hunted the environment like they do everywhere.

[The Larch]

More mammoth related publicity stunts by another biotech start-up.

Meatballs made with mammoth DNA created by Australian food startup

CNN — Woolly mammoth remains, with fur and tissue still in tact, are regularly found entombed in Arctic permafrost. Their discovery has allowed scientists to sequence the mammoth genome and learn intriguing details about the lives of these extinct Ice Age giants.

Now, some of that information is being used to grow an approximation of mammoth meat in a lab.

Vow, an Australian cultured meat startup, has made what it describes as a mammoth meatball. The project's goal, according to the company, is to draw attention to the potential of cultured meat to make eating habits more planet friendly. On Tuesday, the meatball will join the collection at Rijksmuseum Boerhaave — a museum of science and medicine in the Netherlands.

"We need to start rethinking how we get our food. My biggest hope for this project is ... that a lot more people across the world begin to hear about cultured meat," said James Ryall, Vow's chief scientific officer.

Creating 'mammoth meat'
A wonderfully wacky publicity stunt, the meatballs aren't intended for human consumption. Even calling the creation mammoth meat is a bit of a stretch. It's more like lab-made lamb mingled with a tiny amount of mammoth DNA.

Scientists working on the project didn't have access to a frozen stash of mammoth tissue on which to base their efforts. Instead, they focused on a protein present in mammals called myoglobin that gives meat its texture, color and taste, identifying the DNA sequence for the mammoth version in a publicly available genome database.

They filled in gaps in the mammoth myoglobin DNA sequence using information from the genome of an African elephant. The scientists inserted the synthesized gene into a sheep muscle cell, which was then cultured, or grown, in a lab.

The team was eventually able to produce about 400 grams of mammoth meat.

"From a genomic point of view, it's only one gene amongst all the other sheep genes that is mammoth," said Ernst Wolvetang, a professor and senior group leader at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at the University of Queensland, who was part of the project. "It's one gene out of 25,000."

Ryall said the mammoth myoglobin did change the physical appearance of the sheep muscle cells. Though our Stone Age ancestors hunted and presumably feasted on mammoth, Ryall and Wolvetang both said they had not tasted the meatballs.

"Normally, we would taste our products and play around with them. But we were hesitant to immediately try and taste because we're talking about a protein that hasn't existed for 5,000 years. I've got no idea what the potential allergenicity might be of this particular protein," Ryall said.

"That's one of the reasons why we're not offering this as a product. It's not going to go up for sale, because we've got no idea about the safety profile of this particular product," he added.

Cultured vs. the real thing

Advocates hope cultured meat will reduce the need to slaughter animals for food and help fight the climate crisis. The food system is responsible for about a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, most of which result from animal agriculture.

Vow hopes to soon get regulatory approval in Singapore, the first country to approve cultured meat, to sell lab-made quail meat it has developed. In the United States, the FDA has said that lab-grown chicken is OK for human consumption.

The carcasses of mammoths, which went extinct about 5,000 years ago, have been found so well preserved in permafrost, they still had blood in their veins.

Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University's Centre for Paleogenetics who sequenced the world's oldest mammoth DNA, knows what mammoth meat actually tastes like.

During a field trip to the Yana River in Siberia in 2012, Dalén said he tried a small piece of frozen meat taken from partial carcass of a baby mammoth. While he said couldn't see great scientific value in the meatball project, were they to ever go on sale, Dalén said he would definitely taste one.

"Without doubt I would love to try this!" he said. "It cannot possibly taste worse than real mammoth meat."

[Sheilbh]

I don't know why but I find that quite upsetting

Leave mammoths alone!

[garbon]

I don't know why but I find that quite upsetting

Leave mammoths alone!

Something for your therapist?