Recreating Mammoths. Two TV shows in recent days sent me searching the Internet to find out what, if anything, scientists are doing to recreate extinct species for which we have DNA.
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The first was an episode of PBS's science program Nova about amber, that mentioned the hope that scientists might find dinosaur DNA in mosquitoes trapped in ancient sap. My little state, New Jersey, has a lot of amber, but I was too concerned with other matters at the time to watch that program in its entirety. Nova's website says that successfully retrieving intact dinosaur DNA from amber-encased mosquitoes is most unlikely.
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You will recall that Hollywood made a couple of movies about recreating dinosaurs from recovered DNA. Those evil films were nothing but another stage on which the sado-masochistic monsters who control filmic media could play out their demented fantasies of violence and death — as entertainment. Appallingly, the films made a lot of money. But the science has been ridiculed.
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Charles Osgood of CBS considered the matter on radio in 2002 and found that scientists have already managed to resurrect some antique features of modern creatures.

In "Jurassic Park," researchers recreated long-extinct dinosaurs from blood preserved in mosquito amber. While that's probably impossible, scientists say they may hatch a dinosaur from a chicken egg by the end of the century. In fact, UCLA scientists have recently re-created chickens with teeth and snakes with rudimentary legs, vestiges of their long lost ancestors.

One of the problems with recreating dinosaurs is that they died out a very long time ago (125 million years), and finding amber that contains dinosaur DNA in any form, be it blood within mosquitoes (how long would a mosquito's proboscis (needle) have to be to reach blood in a dinosaur's skin??) or skin cells rubbed off on tree trunks, is a challenge. But there are much more recently-extinct animals from which we do in fact have intact DNA.
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Today, Discovery's Science Channel broadcast Mastodon In Your Backyard — The Ultimate Guide, which discussed theories about why mastodons died out. That reminded me of woolly mammoths found intact in Siberia.
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In 1984 I visited then-Leningrad, RSFSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia) and made a point of visiting the Zoological Museum. I took these fotos. The first is a view of the skeleton of a mammoth.

The second is of a stuffed mammoth(!) in the in Hall of Mammoths.

This is not a reconstruction from fossils but an actual skin-and-bones mammoth as found in permafrost. The end of the trunk, not visible here, was shortened for having been eaten by dogs when the carcass was exposed to the elements in 1905. The mammoth's awkward position is that in which it was found, the way it apparently landed on falling into a ravine, where it died and was frozen in flesh and time for 40,000 years. (I'm missing the cable for my scanner, so cannot re-scan at larger size these fotos that were scaled down for the Expansionist Party's Russia page, but you get the idea.)
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The Zoological Museum's website shows at the top a better foto, of a baby mammoth (poor little thing) found intact and now displayed in a glass case.
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Every now and then another frozen mammoth is discovered in Russia, in excellent condition, the meat even being edible. Plainly there is mammoth DNA aplenty for scientists to use to try to recreate this extinct species. There may also be DNA from mastodons, an even more ancient, related species that also did not die out until some 10,000 years ago, in actual bones, not fossils. Dwarf mammoths are believed to have died out on Wrangell Island as recently as 4,000 years ago, so there may as well be dwarf-mammoth DNA around to manipulate. Is anybody working to resurrect these ancient animals? I checked the Internet.

A group of privately funded Japanese scientists has a mammoth project for Siberia -- a safari park they hope might eventually feature a genetic hybrid of the extinct woolly mammals and modern-day elephants.

Siberia is not the only place such a park might be located. Alaska or the colder portions of the Great Plains might also be a good place for such critters to roam.
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I don't know why this has attracted so little public attention. I find it very exciting.
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There's something else that warrants public attention: the theory that has achieved greatest popularity about why mammoths and mastodons went extinct — human over-hunting.

Most scholars now agree that hunters—more than climate change or a mystery epidemic—are what doomed the mammoths.

Scientists have found marks on bones that indicated the corpses were butchered, and even holes in skulls and the like that suggest that primitive peoples did not merely find dead animals and harvest the meat, but actually killed them to eat.
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There's a problem with this, and the assertion that a number of other species were also wiped out by early man: primitives, we are told over and over, lived in balance with nature. Yet American Indians and Eskimos wiped out mammoths, mastodons, and other species? Hmm. Did their famed reverence for animals and careful balancing act with nature develop from realization that previous profligate behavior had robbed them of rich sources of meat? After how many extinctions? How long did it take before they realized that you can't predate upon nature with no concern for the consequences, but must at best harvest animals, or domesticate them, not drive them into extinction?
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Something is wrong. Either people did not hunt animals to extinction or early man did not have reverence for nature. One of the other. Not both.
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(On a related note, the morons who run the Bronx Zoo have decided to phase out their elephant exhibit, one of the very most favorite areas of the Zoo for almost everyone, because of cost. Couldn't some super-rich Republican establish an endowment not just to maintain the present exhibit but even to increase the herd and make it even more interesting? The elephant is, after all, the symbol of the Republican Party. Shouldn't our Replutocrats be offended that the City of New York wants to drive elephants out of the Nation's largest urban center?)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,273. CBS, however, said this evening that it is 2,275.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:42 PM