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Woolly mammoth revival 'possible'

Scientists have held out hope of resurrecting the woolly mammoth by extracting sperm from animals encased in ice.

Researchers have made the surprising discovery that sperm taken from the frozen reproductive organs of dead mice can produce viable offspring.

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they suggest that sperm from frozen mammoths could be used to bring the extinct creatures back to life.

The idea would be to inject mammoth sperm, assuming it could be retrieved, into the eggs of female elephants.

A successful pregnancy would produce the closest thing possible to a living woolly mammoth, the result of crossing one of the extinct animals with a close modern day relative.

Sperm is routinely frozen for In-Vitro Fertilisation treatment, but has to be carefully stored and protected.

The new research showed that it is possible simply to freeze whole male mice, or their reproductive organs, and use the sperm extracted from them to produce offspring.

In one test, sperm were retrieved from the bodies of mice that had been kept frozen at minus 20C for 15 years. The freezing procedure involved no hi-tech cryoprotection, said the Japanese scientists, led by Dr Atsuo Ogura from the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Ibaraki.

It was not known how long viable sperm could be frozen in animal bodies, said the researchers. But the findings raised the intriguing prospect of resurrecting extinct animals that had remained frozen since the ice age.

The scientists wrote: "If spermatozoa of extinct mammalian species (eg woolly mammoth) can be retrieved from animal bodies that were kept frozen for millions of years in permanent frost, live animals might be restored by injecting them into oocytes (eggs) from females of closely related species."

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Originally posted by Nath
What did they eat way back in the day?

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Originally posted by robmarriott
cavemen.

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Originally posted by robmarriott
answer for everything you

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Originally posted by jake
ah yeh. But 'LOOK' at them. The tiger done what was right.

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