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Mar 19

Preserved woolly-mammoth autopsy shows cloning is a real possibility

(Credit: Woolly mammoth image by Flying Puffin, CC BY-SA 2.0)

The female woolly mammoth unearthed in the Lyakhovsky Islands in May 2013 could one day become the “mother” of the first woolly mammoth to walk the earth in millennia.

The discovery of the beast caused excitement when the scientists who unearthed her found that she was very well preserved — to the point that her blood was still liquid after all these years.

Now, after a necropsy (an autopsy on an animal), the team has discovered that the mammoth’s soft tissues are in excellent condition, so much so that they may be able to extract enough high-quality DNA to perform an analysis — and maybe even a reconstruction.

“We have dissected the soft tissues of the mammoth — and I must say that we didn’t expect such results. The carcass that is more than 43,000 years old has preserved better than a body of a human buried for six months,” Viktoria Egorova, chief of the Research and Clinical Diagnostic Laboratory of the Medical Clinic of North-Eastern Federal University, Siberia, … [Read more]