Woolly mammoth project seeks injection

They first appeared on Earth over four million years ago and thrived, but became extinct about 10,000 years ago due to overhunting by our ancestors.

However, scientists are now taking a page from the movie Jurassic Park by using a technique that involves impregnating an Indian elephant with mammoth sperm and then repeating the procedure with its offspring. It is hoped that pursuing this process with the mammoth's closest surviving genetic relative could produce a creature that is 88 percent mammoth in 50 years.

An alternative method would involve cloning the mammoth from DNA found in the soft tissue recovered from under the Siberian permafrost. This is not ideal, as complete strands of DNA from mammoths are still hard to come by, even though methods of extraction have improved.

There are believed to be ten million mammoths buried in the permafrost in Siberia, but because of the sparse population in the region only around one hundred specimens have been recovered. Another kink in the plan is that despite the fact that most mammoths recovered from Siberia are seen as some of the finest museum examples in the world, poor excavation and preservation methods have ruined the chances for any reproduction of the animals by destroying tissue samples.

The Mammoth Creation Project in 1996 won permission from Russia's Sakha region to use a 160-square kilometre preserve near Duvannyi Yar in Siberia should they ever succeed. Interest has surged recently due to an injection of funding into the project.

If you do happen to have any mammoth sperm, feel free to contact the genetic scientists at Kinki University, Japan. Yes, you read that right. µ