discoverynews:

Woolly Mammoth to be Cloned

Mammoths used to be a common sight on the landscape of North America and Eurasia. One of my favorite papers of recent months concerned the earliest known depiction of an animal from the Americas. It was a mammoth engraved on a mammoth bone. Many of our distant ancestors probably had regular face-to-face encounters with the elephant-like giants.

The key to cloning the woolly mammoth is to replace the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant with those extracted from the mammoth’s bone marrow cells. Doing this, according to the researchers, can result in embryos with mammoth DNA.