Imagine standing next to a live woolly mammoth, dwarfed by its enormous tusks and carpet of hair.
Ice Age exhibition in Denmark.
It might turn its head suddenly to look at a noise, and you would have to dive out of the way lest you be impaled by its ivory tusks.
Comparative sizes of the woolly mammoth species with a human for scale.
This is not the stuff of fiction anymore, or even science fiction. Japanese and Russian scientists are trying to clone woolly mammoth DNA with the hopes of implanting it in an elephant for gestation.
A family tree of Primelephus, , the hypothesized ancestor of both Woolly Mammoths and modern elephants.
Since modern elephants and extinct woolly mammoths are closely related, an elephant may be able to gestate a woolly mammoth if scientists are successful with cloning using DNA from fossils. Specifically, the Asian elephant, Elephas maximus, diverged from the woolly mammoth line approximately 5 MYA, so scientists merely need to map the genome of the Asian elephant and the woolly mammoth, and then create an Asian elephant/woolly mammoth hybrid. For more detailed information, check out livescience.com.
A prescient man has asked, and answered, the question of where these woolly mammoths would live if these scientists are ever successful.
Pleistocene Park
Part II will outline exactly what Pleistocene Park is now and what it hopes to be in the future.
For more information on the Pleistocene, also called the Ice Age, check out this link or watch the animated Ice Age movies.
This is based on a piece of creative nonfiction I wrote 9 years ago. I'm sort of testing ideas for children's books, so if you have any input on my writing or formatting, please let me know.
