Science b*tch!

We can't bring them back *yet

We could try making the dna from scratch, but that's just about implausible.

Go back to the 40's and tell them about genome mapping. They'd have a similar response.

In the future, we shall see

Basically they're going to implant an embryo into an elephant and the elephant will give birth to another elephant, only it has mammoth-like traits. They do this again and again until the offspring stop showing elephant traits and only mammoth traits. So I guess you can say it's kind of like breeding chickens to be featherless or to have claws on its wings by tapping into ancestral DNA.

Exactly. We'd have to do it from scratch or use a chicken as a base, since Dinosaur dna is dead.

Technically not. Scientists have recently reclassed birds as dinosaurs so you can't really say that Dino DNA is dead. But the embryo would have mammoth DNA, it would just come out all elephanty, which would make it more akin to a Colombian Mammoth than a Wooly Mammoth. And I imagine that the DNA is still good since early 20th century explorers are said to have eaten Mastodon meat frozen in ice.

We are currently incapable of creating Jurassic Park scale dinos, but with advancement we should be able to make our own dna.

But they did discover a very well preserved wooly mammoth a while ago and claimed they'll try cloning it. Don't y'all remember?

Wooly mammoths are definately possible

Wooly everything

I want wooly whales! Oh and wooly giraffes! How about wooly tigers?

^looks like @mialinay wants not just Jurassic Park but Jurassic World

I'm sorry, you misspelled Jurassic Wool

Well played

Wooly Whale? That reminds me of the post today of the rotting whale

Please vote this to the top! At least someone is actually thinking!
We have NO earthly right to do this,never mind understand the consequences!

It's not like we're bringing back an apex predator

It may not be dangerous for us, but seems like a bad idea for the mammoth themselves. We still have a pretty big illegal ivory trade, and I'm sure mammoth ivory would be worth even more. If the mammoths weren't highly protected its likely that they'd be poached into extinction once again.

I highly doubt that'd happen. The mammoths, which would basically be more or less elephants for the first generation or two, would be bred in captivity until there's a large enough population to sustain themselves in their natural habitat.

Of course they would be safe until they could be poached off in the wild. Poaching has made both rhinos and elephants very near extinction, it's very possible for it to happen to mammoths as well. We try to protect elephants and rhinos but there is only so much we can do. Of course this isn't a sure thing, but it would really be sad to bring them back from extinction, just to watch them go extinct once again. Another commenter even mention climate change killing them, it just kind of seems like we're setting them up for failure.

I guess time will tell.

Flooding the market would make poaching much less profitable.

True, I think I saw a post a while back about trying to flood the market with fake rhino horns in order to push the poachers out of the market. I've also seen them dyeing elephant tusks with a pink dye in order to ruin it, it doesn't even hurt the elephants. Hopefully they will do something similar with mammoths in order to protect them as well.

And even if poachers did kill them, couldn't they just be cloned again?

Fakes are never perfect, and the pink dye is unsustainable.
Still cool though, so maybe it would work out.

Of course they could be cloned again, but it just seems sad and unethical to just continually clone them so poachers could continue to kill them and get rich off it. It would also suck to clone them just so they could die from climate change all over again
-_- hopefully everything goes well, it would be awesome to see them in person.

Anyways I think that poachers would stick to easier targets like elephants seeing as how they don't live at the top of the world.

The high north is similar enough to their original environment that they couldn't really tell the difference. And when I say high north, I mean Canada, Alaska, and Siberia.

On average, during winter, Siberia gets down to about -13 degrees Fahrenheit. During the ice age it wasn't unusual for it to be -50. With everything in mind and the good point you made there's no positive benefit for bringing the mammoth back

That was normal for mammoths, they lived in the Ice Age after all. And there really isn't a benefit, it's just something cool to have.