Pleistocene Park

So remember in Jurassic Park how they thought if someone uncovered dinosaur DNA we'd be able to clone dinosaurs? According to Jack Horner, that doesn't work. In fact, they actually tried it because some dinosaur DNA was discovered. But nothing happened. Instead, as I described previously, Horner argues that the way to reconstruct dinosaurs is to "fix the chicken." So far, scientists have managed to produce a chicken with teeth (although I don't think they've been able to reactivate most of the other dormant genes).

However, a new possibility for cloning and restoring extinct life has just arrived. Dinosaurs are just too old-- all we have left are fossils. We have bones (rather than fossils-- fossils being rock deposits that slowly take the place of bones) from the Pleistocene Era (which includes the last ice age). And now, we have a lot more than that. Scientists have recently uncovered a frozen mammoth that still has blood in it's veins. This means that we can learn more than ever before about these creatures, but it also means that there is plenty of DNA. And, if scientists can re-germinate a plant from 32,000 years ago, then there's a good chance that they can grow a baby mammoth. Maybe in the next 50 years, they'll make a Pleistocene Park.

Thoughts on Prehistoric Mammals

After my German class this morning, I sat and enjoyed a cup of tea on the porch with Servia. We discussed some science news that she had been reading. One of the articles she read was about a gigantic rabbit species found on an island near Spain. The rabbits are almost unrecognizable as such from the depiction in National Geographic. From there, we branched out more generally into a discussion to prehistoric island species and specifically the pigmy mammoth. Apparently, there were two entirely different types of pigmy mammoth. One was the mammoths of the channel islands, which were much like small elephants. There were also small woolly mammoths that remained in islands near the arctic. While I was reading up on this clarification, I found that there is a depiction of a mammoth from Egypt and some thought that it might be one of the Siberian mammoths or possibly even a mammoth similar to thoseof the channel islands that were found on Mediterranean islands.