Bringing a 40000-Year-Old Mammoth Back to Life

Scientists are attempting to bring a 40,000-year-old woolly mammoth back to life, so to speak, by cloning one of these massive, long-extinct beasts discovered recently in Siberia.

The adult female mammoth was so well-preserved, Russian scientists say, that muscle tissue was still remaining in the carcass and even some of the creature's blood oozing out of it. And as one of the most intact mammoth specimens in the history of paleontology, researchers plan to take full advantage.

The Siberian mammoth was discovered frozen during an excavation on Novosibirsk Islands, located in the frigid seas of northeastern Russia, back in May 2013. At the time, two giant tusks were poking out of the permafrost, until further excavations unearthed almost a complete mammoth, with three legs, most of the body, part of the head and the trunk still intact.

Using carbon dating and growth rates from the tusks, scientists from the Siberian Northeastern Federal University determined that the ancient female, dating back 40,000 years, was likely in its mid-50s and successfully weaned eight calves and lost one baby before her demise. Analyses revealed the circumstances of her gruesome death, in which the mammoth became trapped in a peat bog and was then eaten alive by predators such as wolves.

Feces and bacteria in the intestines also revealed the ancient matriarch ate grassland plants such as buttercups and dandelions, earning her the nickname Buttercup.

But the most important part of this discovery is the fact that Buttercup's blood was still freshly leaking from her body, ideal for DNA analysis and a cloning experiment.

"This is definitely one of the best samples people have ever found," Insung Hwang, a cloning scientist at the SOOAM Biotech Research Center, told Live Science.

"The fact that blood has been found is promising for us, because it just tells us how good of a condition the mammoth was kept in for 43,000 years," he added.

Siberia's freezing temperatures during the Ice Age - reaching 14 degrees Fahrenheit (-10 Celsius) - are what has kept the blood alive for so long. But the blood's DNA is understandably fragile, and a complete copy of the mammoth's genome has yet to be found, so the possibility of Buttercup being resurrected from the dead is still up in the air. It is still possible that researchers can piece together long fragments of the DNA to create the genome.

By the end of the last Ice Age, about 4,000 years ago, woolly mammoths went extinct after succumbing to climate change and human predation - recent enough that cloning could be possible. These prehistoric behemoths aren't the only iconic species that scientists are trying to bring back to life. The passenger pigeon, a once-abundant North American bird numbering in the billions, may be making a comeback when scientists revive the extinct animal using museum-specimen DNA in a process known as de-extinction.