A team of scientists in South Korea volunteered to clone the cave lion from skin and muscle tissue samples obtained from frozen cubs.
It is not the first time that Korean scientists, led by cloning expert Hwang Woo-Suk, have undertaken such a difficult and responsible task. In parallel with the cloning of the cave lion, the team is working to revive another long-extinct animal - the mammoth. The lion cubs found in Yakutia, according to research, were born about 12,000 years ago and died just a couple of weeks after they were born. Russian scientists plan to save the found lion cubs for future science, but at the same time they will allow Korean specialists to take small tissue samples for their experiment. Initially, the Koreans tried to persuade them to give them most of the skull of one of the lion cubs, as well as his paws, but their Russian colleagues refused them.
“The dispute arose due to the fact that any scientist wants to have at hand as much tissue as possible for his research, in this I perfectly understand my colleagues from South Korea,” explained Albert Protopopov, head of the mammoth fauna department of the Academy of Sciences of Yakutia. “We've also planned a lot of research, so it's important for us to preserve the original morphology of the remains. Such disputes are completely normal for the scientific world, and, in the end, we still came to a compromise."
Dr. Hwang Woo-Suk has already taken all the samples necessary for his experiment, and soon the cloning process will enter an active phase. Let's hope that the Korean scientists will succeed and very soon we will see real cave lions that died out more than ten thousand years ago.