South Korean scientists want to clone 40,000-year-old mammoth

Apparently, scientists already have the means to clone a mammoth nearly 40, 000 years old - something remarkably remarkable, though equally uncertain. The name of the mammoth studied is Buttercup and it was found in the Siberia region last year, impressively preserved in the middle of the ice. You might remember Yuka, a baby mammoth that was also found in Siberia, as we reported here in Mega Curious.

It may sound like something from Jurassic Park films, but researchers at South Korean biotech company SOOAM are considering cloning and resuscitating the animal as tests for a complete set of DNA are being done. If a complete set of DNA is not found by scientists, they can map specific regions of the animal, such as hair and prey, into elephant genomes.

Although theoretically possible, there are a number of ethical issues surrounding the cloning procedure of such an old and extinct animal. Firstly, the mammoth should be raised by an elephant, and there is no guarantee that the elephant would survive pregnancy - the animal is very likely to die.

Several elephant tests would also be done until scientists found a way to keep the mammoth alive and healthy inside the surrogate mother's body (and elephant gestation is not very fast or simple, occurring in about 20 or 22 months).

Also, we don't know how long the mammoth baby would survive after giving birth. To complement these issues, we now know that mammoths were extremely sociable animals that lived in packs, so the cloned animal would feel quite alone on today's earth - and would never live in its natural environment as the whole world would be curious. to meet a living being from another age. So it may be best to leave things that have passed away in the past forgotten.