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Woolly Mammoth Is About To Resurrect

Wooly mammoth art - Shutterstock

A team of scientist have revealed that they are working on a way to resurrect the extinct woolly mammoth, history’s biggest land mammal.

While attempts of cloning and resurrecting extinct species has been frowned upon, we’ve all seen what happened in Jurassic Park, a group of Harvard scientist are working on bringing back the woolly mammoth. They will do it with the help of modern elephants.

Three wooly mammoth fossils at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art - Shutterstock

Three woolly mammoth fossils at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – Shutterstock

The woolly mammoth went extinct of the face of the Earth around 4,000 years ago, but scientists are on the verge of resurrecting the ancient giant.

The lead scientist of the “de-extinction” program announced just ahead of the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Boston this week that they are just two years away from giving birth to a live baby mammoth.

The new mammoth will be birthed through a genetically engineered embryo, which have had mammoth genes into the DNA of an Asian elephant.

The hybrid elephant-mammoth, will be an elephant with shares a large number of mammoth traits, a “mammophant”, an animal that we can be seeing in a couple of years.

The mammophant would be only partially elephant, and enjoy mammoth features like small ears, subcutaneous fat, long shaggy hair and cold-adapted blood.

These traits will be spliced into the DNA of an Asian Elephant using the Crispr gene-editing tool.

Given the danger the birth can expose a female Asian elephant to, they are looking into growing the hybrid animal inside an artificial tomb instead of a surrogate mother. However, many questions prevail around the ethical aspect of the experiment, along with worries about how the offspring would adapt socially among other elephants.

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