Geneticists all over the world have long been concerned about cloning prehistoric animals. Some scientists hope to "revive" mammoths in 20-30 years, others say that we are talking about the next five years. And still others have almost reanimated the extinct frog, only the embryo was not viable. But this is just the beginning.
At the end of March this year, researchers from the Australian University of New South Wales managed to reproduce the genome of a rare frog species that became extinct in the early 80s of the last century. But, alas, the cloned embryos were not viable.
By the way, such a sad fate befell the recreated Pyrenean mountain goat in 2009. The baby died just a few minutes after birth. But scientists do not give up, planning to recreate animals that died out tens of thousands of years ago.
“With frogs, this could have happened after two or three years of work,” says Hendrik Poinar, a geneticist at McMaster University in Canada. “But the world could see cloned mammoths only in 20-30 years.”
The specialist, however, does not exclude the possibility that the second birth of mammoths is coming very soon. Scientists also plan to clone the Tasmanian tiger, which disappeared in the 30s of the last century, and the dodo bird that became extinct in the 17th century, unable to fly.
But the nimble Japanese are going to recreate the mammoth before 2017. Their South Korean counterparts also have “fast species” on these animals.
To do this, you only need one thing - a fragment of tissue of an extinct species with well-preserved DNA. "DNA is quite suitable for cloning, even with an age of 200 thousand years," - explains the publication.
"Hunting for mammoths" carried away both scientists and ordinary "grave robbers" of these mammals. And so much so that the German journalist Moritz Gatman is already sounding the alarm and even talking about the facts of the shedding of human blood.
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His article "The Curse of the Mammoth", published in the German magazine Focus, tells how in Yakutia - a real "refrigerator" that hides a large number of extinct animals - precious fossil remains are extracted from the permafrost. Excavation takes on the character of a competition, when, instead of a thoughtful analysis of the situation, the bones are pulled out quickly, chaotically, without any scientific approach.