Thursday, 6 July 2017

Mammoth Resurrection: 11 Hurdles to Bringing Back an Ice Age Beast

By |

Many mammoth questions

The road to bringing back the mammoth — a giant that went extinct at the end of the last ice age — is filled with barriers. 
 The questions are almost never ending: Will scientists find ancient, uncontaminated mammoth DNA? How will they create new mammoths? If a mammoth calf is born, how will it learn how to behave without a parent or herd to guide it? 

Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, discusses these queries in "How to Clone A Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction" (Princeton University Press, 2015). Here are 11 of the many challenges she considers, including those that are scientific, ethical and environmental. 

Read more 

No comments:

Post a Comment

You only need to enter your comment once! Comments will appear once they have been moderated. This is so as to stop the would-be comedian who has been spamming the comments here with inane and often offensive remarks. You know who you are!