Mammoth in 4 years? Woo!

Taking a break from the outrage parade, we have a fun story about cloning the woolly mammoth.

Previous efforts in the 1990s to recover nuclei in cells from the skin and muscle tissue from mammoths found in the Siberian permafrost failed because they had been too badly damaged by the extreme cold.

But a technique pioneered in 2008 by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology, was successful in cloning a mouse from the cells of another mouse that had been frozen for 16 years.

Now that hurdle has been overcome, Akira Iritani, a professor at Kyoto University, is reactivating his campaign to resurrect the species that died out 5,000 years ago.

"Now the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth," he told The Daily Telegraph.

Woolly mammoths, back from the dead.  Dang!  That's freakin' cool, you've got to admit.

I'm changing this place into a mammoth farm, we've got enough snow here.

The Mammoth Phantom