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- It sounds like a movie plot come to life - a US geologist
aims to excavate and clone a woolly mammoth from DNA.
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- Larry Agenbroad from the Northern Arizona University
is part of an international team of scientists whose first task is to cut
the cloning candidate, the likes of which roamed the earth about 23,000
years ago, from a Siberian ice field.
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- The adult male mammoth, estimated to be about 40-years-old
when it became frozen, was found by a nine-year-old nomadic reindeer herder
in 1997.
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- It has been named Jarkov, after the boy's family.
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- "To feel the skin and touch the flesh of the mammoth
will be quite spectacular. It's the closest I've gotten to an animal I've
been chasing for more than 30 years," Professor Agenbroad said.
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- Professor Agenbroad and scientists from the Netherlands,
France and Russia, are removing the ice-encased animal from the Taimyr
Peninsula in Siberia and airlifting it more than 320 kilometres to the
city of Khatanga.
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- The mammoth will be kept frozen there in an underground
tunnel, where scientists will study the three-metre-tall animal.
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- Besides analysing dirt, pollen, and even its stomach
contents, the primary task will be to extract DNA for cloning.
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- The cloning process involves putting DNA from the mammoth
into an Asian elephant's egg that has been stripped of elephant genes,
so even though an elephant would give birth, the baby would be a mammoth,
not a hybrid, Professor Agenbroad said.
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- "I don't think [the elephant] would know the difference,
though she might wonder why her baby is so hairy," he said.
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- Mr Agenbroad said he is not counting on success.
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- "I guess it would be a rarity, but the biologists
are quite optimistic," he said.
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