kayshapero

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Awhile back I recall musing on how the biggest problem of recreating the Mammoth could be where to put it. This would probably be it, a project which has been going on in Siberia for many years has recently released a kickstarter (Pleistocene Park) to help fund the recreation of an environment more conducive to keeping the permafrost permafrozen than things are at the moment. And mammoths would be a key part of the faunal composition if they can get them - maintaining and increasing grasslands takes a lot of fiddling, and knocking over trees to keep the taiga at bay is a pretty elephantine behavior.

Of course there's still that little engineering problem: First clone your mammoth. :) And also of course, one mammoth won't help much - you need a species who will breed true, and the ability to create social groups - like us elephants learn a LOT of what they need to know from the other elephants.

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From:

kayshapero

Found the article I was looking for when I spotted the Kickstarter. It's in The Atlantic, April issue but I don't think it's an April fool stunt because there are too many footprints all over the net in the last twenty years. Have fun! (Never occurred to me how odiferous melting permafrost would be, but then when you consider how much of the content would be things frozen in mid decay...)

Edited Date: 2017-03-19 05:45 am (UTC)

From:

kjn

Yeah, Swedish fan Torill Kornfeldt is a science journalist and has worked a lot with various projects for resurrecting extinct species. When she mentioned the quality of frozen mammoth (and wooly rhinoceroses and so on) meat, she mentioned that during at least the first few years after death, the carcass would undergo several cycles of yearly thawings and freezings.