[HN Gopher] 52,000-year-old woolly mammoth chromosomes reconstru...
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52,000-year-old woolly mammoth chromosomes reconstructed from
'jerky-like' skin
Author : speckx
Score : 41 points
Date : 2024-07-12 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.abc.net.au)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.abc.net.au)
| ourmandave wrote:
| The caps are melting and some people are all in on _bringing
| back_ the woolly mammoth.
|
| How about the woolly rhino while we're at it? Maybe open a zoo in
| Death Valley to house 'em.
| falsaberN1 wrote:
| Gotta reproduce that mammoth jerky somehow.
| rkallos wrote:
| Woolly mammoths were a geoengineer species that have no living
| proxy. Bringing them back is definitely a controversial
| project, but there's a case to be made that de-extincting the
| woolly mammoth could help prevent permafrost from melting.
| willi59549879 wrote:
| Of how many animals would we need genetic material from? are
| there enough dna available that it would be possible?
|
| if all animals will be clones, genetic diversity will be a
| problem. hopefully there is enough material available. seeing
| mammoths die out in real time would be more heartbreaking
| dhosek wrote:
| Curiously, it turns out that elephants eating fauna actually
| promotes plant and tree growth. I remember reading something
| (ca 2007?) about the possibility that reintroducing elephants
| to the American Southwest could lead to reforestation of areas
| that are currently desert.
|
| Which, of course, doesn't really provide good justification for
| de-extinctifying the mammoth (although as I say this, I wonder
| if they might acually play a role in preserving the permafrost,
| as per this recent Science Friday story:
| https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/becoming-earth-how-li...
| )
| szundi wrote:
| In that case the humans started the global warming when made
| the mammoths extinct - how ironic, the industrial revolution
| is just the top of the cake
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Agriculture in general significantly reduced the amount of
| carbon trapped in vegetation. One of the causes of the
| Little Ice Age is often proposed to be the reduction of
| human population (and correspondingly, land area under
| cultivation) and reforestation after the Black Death,
| Mongol invasions, and the Columbian Exchange.
| card_zero wrote:
| Pleistocene Park and albedo. I don't think you've got this
| exactly right, it's about grassland, not forest. Also forest
| is supposedly bad for permafrost, raising temperature
| slightly.
|
| > Pleistocene Park is a truly fascinating and daring
| experiment in the far Arctic, in Siberia, run by the Zimovs,
| Sergey and Nikita Zimov, a father and son scientific team,
| and their families. And they have this theory that large
| megafauna in the Pleistocene, things like mammoths and
| mastodons and bison, these large grazing animals, co-evolved
| with the grasslands that existed at the time. And so the
| grazers and the grasses maintained and sustained each other.
|
| > These large animals would trample the trees and shrubs that
| would otherwise compete with grass, and the grass would
| provide these grazers with this rapidly regenerating
| vegetation that they could continually graze on. But it went
| further than that in their estimation, because, together, the
| grasses and the grazers, according to their theory, were
| helping to keep the permafrost frozen.
|
| > So, for example, the grazers, just by being so large and by
| walking through these grasslands, were stripping away these
| insulating layers of snow, which allowed these frigid
| temperatures to penetrate deeper and keep that permafrost
| frozen. And grasses, just by virtue of being lighter, paler
| in color than trees, reflect more light and heat back to
| space. So they're also keeping the land cooler. And so their
| idea is to bring back large grazing animals to Siberia, to
| recreate some version of these ancient Pleistocene
| grasslands, and thereby counteract the thawing of permafrost
| to some extent.
| saalweachter wrote:
| The correlation coefficient between # mammoths and ice cap
| extent is like, r=0.9 over the last 40,000 years.
|
| Obviously we need to bring the mammoths back, if we want to fix
| the global climate.
| cs702 wrote:
| Apparently, the presence of pirates is correlated with global
| cooling too:
|
| https://doctorspaghetti.org/pastafarians-pirates-and-
| climate...
|
| Harrr!
| rezmason wrote:
| Maybe this is what it'll take to seriously combat global
| warming. Filling zoos with wooly mammoths, and then extorting
| us into dropping global temperatures to keep them alive.
|
| Unless we're headed for a Day After Tomorrow situation. Then it
| might be the mammoths keeping us in zoos
| fauria wrote:
| Would it be possible, with today's technology, to clone a woolly
| mammoth?
| johncessna wrote:
| They're actively trying:
|
| https://colossal.com/mammoth/
|
| https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a42708517/s...
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I do hope, millions of years in the future, the sentient
| cockroaches of earth have the curiosity to clone the long-
| extinct humans.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Sure, they will miss the flesh so badly, what a pitty they
| precipitated mankind extinction...
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I'm more interested in mastodons, their smaller, temperate
| climate cousins. Fits better with our warmer world. And so
| cute.
|
| They used to range across this whole (North American)
| continent. I just giggle at thinking the havoc they'd cause let
| loose in northeastern forests again.
| Qem wrote:
| Is ti possible to do this for the giant ground sloth too, or
| there is no well preserved DNA sample for it so far?
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