from the we-like-our-pets-big-and-furry dept.
An international team of scientists led by Dr. Love Dalén at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm has published [abstract] the complete genome sequences of two woolly mammoths. Their analysis found evidence of inbreeding among the final population of mammoths on Wrangel Island, as well as a genetic bottleneck around 300,000 years ago, before the arrival of modern humans in the region. Woolly mammoths went extinct around 4,000 years ago, and although Dr. Dalén's team is not attempting to revive the mammoth, they aren't dismissing the possibility:
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.
"It would be a lot of fun (in principle) to see a living mammoth, to see how it behaves and how it moves," he said.
But he would rather his research was not used to this end.
"It seems to me that trying this out might lead to suffering for female elephants and that would not be ethically justifiable."
Dr Dalén and the international group of researchers he is collaborating with are not attempting to resurrect the mammoth. But the Long Now Foundation, an organisation based in San Francisco, claims that it is. Now, with the publication of the complete mammoth genome, it could be a step closer to achieving its aim. On its website, the foundation 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."
Related Stories
Researchers have pinpointed the approximate date and cause of extinction of woolly mammoths on St. Paul Island, Alaska:
While the Minoan culture on Crete was just beginning, woolly mammoths were disappearing from St. Paul Island, Alaska, according to an international team of scientists who have dated this extinction to 5,600 years ago.
[...] In this study, three different spores from fungi that grow on large animal dung were extracted from lake cores and used to determine when the mammoths were no longer on the island. Proxies in sediments from cores from a lake near the cave were used to determine the time of the demise of the mammoth population. [...] Sediment DNA from the lake cores showed the presence of mammoth DNA until 5,650 years ago, plus or minus 80 years. After that time, there is no mammoth DNA and so no mammoths on the island. The youngest of the newly dated mammoth remains' dates fall within the mammoth DNA range and the fungal spore dates as well.
[...] The island, which formed between 14,700 and 13,500 years ago rapidly shrank until 9,000 years ago and continued slowly shrinking until 6,000 years ago and now is only 42 square miles in area. [...] The shrinking of the island concentrated the mammoths in a smaller area and diminished available water. Pollen from the lake cores indicate that the area around the lake was denuded of vegetation by the mammoths. Like elephants today, when the water became cloudy and turgid, the mammoths probably dug holes nearby to obtain cleaner water. Both of these things increased erosion in the area and helped fill in the lake, decreasing the available water even more. After the extinction of the mammoths, the cores show that erosion stopped and vegetation returned to the area. In essence, the mammoths contributed to their own demise. The researchers note that this research "highlights freshwater limitation as an overlooked extinction driver and underscores the vulnerability of small island populations to environmental change, even in the absence of human influence."
Timing and causes of mid-Holocene mammoth extinction on St. Paul Island, Alaska (open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1604903113)
Related: Woolly Mammoth Genome Sequenced
Scientists led by George Church claim that they are about two years away from beginning a de-extinction of the woolly mammoth. They aim to produce a hybrid mammoth-elephant embryo with many spliced-in mammoth traits:
The woolly mammoth vanished from the Earth 4,000 years ago, but now scientists say they are on the brink of resurrecting the ancient beast in a revised form, through an ambitious feat of genetic engineering.
Speaking ahead of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston this week, the scientist leading the "de-extinction" effort said the Harvard team is just two years away from creating a hybrid embryo, in which mammoth traits would be programmed into an Asian elephant. "Our aim is to produce a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo," said Prof George Church. "Actually, it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits. We're not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years."
The creature, sometimes referred to as a "mammophant", would be partly elephant, but with features such as small ears, subcutaneous fat, long shaggy hair and cold-adapted blood. The mammoth genes for these traits are spliced into the elephant DNA using the powerful gene-editing tool, Crispr. Until now, the team have stopped at the cell stage, but are now moving towards creating embryos – although, they said that it would be many years before any serious attempt at producing a living creature.
"We're working on ways to evaluate the impact of all these edits and basically trying to establish embryogenesis in the lab," said Church. Since starting the project in 2015 the researchers have increased the number of "edits" where mammoth DNA has been spliced into the elephant genome from 15 to 45. "We already know about ones to do with small ears, subcutaneous fat, hair and blood, but there are others that seem to be positively selected," he said.
Also at New Scientist and GenomeWeb.
Previously: Engineering the Perfect Baby
Woolly Mammoth Genome Sequenced
St. Paul Island Mammoths Died of Thirst 5,600 Years Ago
OBQ: [How Much] Should We Bioengineer Animals to Live in Our Damaged World?
Firm raises $15m to bring back woolly mammoth from extinction
Ten thousand years after woolly mammoths vanished from the face of the Earth, scientists are embarking on an ambitious project to bring the beasts back to the Arctic tundra. The prospect of recreating mammoths and returning them to the wild has been discussed – seriously at times – for more than a decade, but on Monday researchers announced fresh funding they believe could make their dream a reality.
The boost comes in the form of $15m (£11m) raised by the bioscience and genetics company Colossal, co-founded by Ben Lamm, a tech and software entrepreneur, and George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who has pioneered new approaches to gene editing.
The scientists have set their initial sights on creating an elephant-mammoth hybrid by making embryos in the laboratory that carry mammoth DNA. The starting point for the project involves taking skin cells from Asian elephants, which are threatened with extinction, and reprogramming them into more versatile stem cells that carry mammoth DNA. The particular genes that are responsible for mammoth hair, insulating fat layers and other cold climate adaptions are identified by comparing mammoth genomes extracted from animals recovered from the permafrost with those from the related Asian elephants. These embryos would then be carried to term in a surrogate mother or potentially in an artificial womb. If all goes to plan – and the hurdles are far from trivial – the researchers hope to have their first set of calves in six years.
[...] The project is framed as an effort to help conserve Asian elephants by equipping them with traits that allow them to thrive in vast stretches of the Arctic known as the mammoth steppe. But the scientists also believe introducing herds of elephant-mammoth hybrids to the Arctic tundra may help restore the degraded habitat and combat some of the impacts of the climate crisis. For example, by knocking down trees, the beasts might help to restore the former Arctic grasslands.
Previously: Woolly Mammoth Genome Sequenced
Resurrection of the Woolly Mammoth Could Begin in Two Years
Analysis Supports Conservation of Existing Species Rather Than De-Extinction of Mammoths
Mammoth DNA Activates Briefly in Mouse Eggs
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @02:03PM
I saw elephants at a zoo once, and what struck me the most was how large their genitalia were. Even relative to their size, the male elephants had very large penises and hefty scrotums. Were wolly mammoths the same? Were they well endowed with large genitalia?
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Saturday April 25 2015, @02:23PM
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/wildlife/9590626/Russian-boy-discovers-woolly-mammoth-of-the-century.html [telegraph.co.uk]
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(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @03:18PM
HOLY FUCK!
(Score: 2) by Tork on Saturday April 25 2015, @05:00PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @08:32PM
Didn't seem like a troll to me. 1/5th of shoulder height is very large even accounting for size.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26 2015, @02:00AM
The word "troll" has lost all meaning these days, because people like you just don't know when to use it. Asking if woolly mammoths have large penises is a reasonable question. Elephants do have very long penises, although they lack girth.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Sunday April 26 2015, @03:54AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @05:46PM
No, Mammoth Fuck for you!
I heard they were casting a mold of it, with you in mind. ;-)
You have to watch what you say around those paleontologists, they are a quirky bunch...especially the ones measuring mammoth cocks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @03:40PM
The blue whale says hi and laughs at their tiny penis, if such things mattered.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Paradise Pete on Saturday April 25 2015, @05:13PM
Everything is relative. You just know there's a blue whale somewhere explaining that it's just that the water is really cold.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday April 25 2015, @04:15PM
The good news is that the woolly mammooth genome has a 94.4% similarity with the elephant genome.
The bad news is that it has a 99.3% similarity with your mom's.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @04:03PM
Read a book recently by a Swedish guy who first sequenced neanderthal dna (or was it egyptian mummy? anyway something super old), and noted how difficult it is to extract DNA material from such old remains and to keep them from contamination, and that many published findings were of compromised nature.
And yet, we see notice of dna sequencing of ancient this and that with some regularity. Are these reliable results?
(Score: 1) by t-3 on Saturday April 25 2015, @04:21PM
We won't know until the mammoths are revived, and even then it's just conjecture really.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @08:38PM
Absolutely. It isn't science until it is empirically tested. So lets test.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @05:52PM
It really depends on the environment the remains have been in.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday April 25 2015, @07:22PM
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(Score: 1) by SunTzuWarmaster on Saturday April 25 2015, @04:20PM
Every time I read one of these stories, I think that I am one step closer to three things:
1 - riding a woolly mammoth
2 - eating a mammoth burger
3 - wearing a mammoth coat
Also, I was in an internet-debate at one time. The other party made the case that "if something is dead, we should keep it that way. They died out thousands of years ago for some reason, and bringing them back is inviting disaster."
My counterpoint was "Do you know what they likely died from? Being hunted to death by humans. Evidence seems to indicate that they are slow, dumb, and delicious.".
(Score: 1) by FlatPepsi on Saturday April 25 2015, @04:27PM
>2 - eating a mammoth burger
I'm with you on #2. Sounds yummy.
>3 - wearing a mammoth coat
Is it just me, or does anyone else get a vision of Elton John?
(Score: 2) by rts008 on Saturday April 25 2015, @05:59PM
Not Elton John, in my mind. Not nearly flamboyant enough.
I immediately pictured Freddy Flinstone from that comment.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday April 25 2015, @05:20PM
If they don't farm Elephants they won't farm Mammoth.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @05:24PM
Being hunted to death by humans
This is a contested point.
I'd cross-off #1 and #3. How about: #4 mammoth ribs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @09:15PM
Apparently, this happens often enough that it was a plot point in an episode of "Northern Exposure".
"Lovers and Madmen" [comcast.net] Original Air Date: May 23, 1994
(The show is set in the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska.)
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @05:06PM
there are people who say that a few species (?) go extinct ever day (amazon and such places?) so it would be a nice gesture to the universe if we could put our human ingenuity and energy to some good for a change? they will prolly eat (and poop) alot ^_^
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday April 26 2015, @02:12AM
Ranchers scream bloody murder about a few bison leaving parks and wandering near their cattle. We might explode their heads if we let mammoths loose.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday April 26 2015, @07:03PM
Let's see them protest this.
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(Score: 4, Informative) by coolgopher on Sunday April 26 2015, @12:57AM
Just in case anyone was wondering, his name isn't pronounced "love", it's more like "loo ve".