Real Jurassic Park? Scientists to bring back woolly mammoth

by Michael Henrich

Doesn't anybody remember Jurassic Park?

Perhaps a certain group of Japanese and Russian scientists does not.

Thanks to the finding of well-preserved bone marrow in a woolly mammoth thigh bone recovered from Siberia, these scientists believe they can clone the long-extinct species and bring it back into existence, according to published reports.

The researchers plan to produce embryos with mammoth DNA by replacing the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant with those taken from the mammoth's marrow cells, the reports state.

Scientists from Russia's Sakha Republic's mammoth museum and Japan's Kinki University are launching the joint research project next year and hope to clone a woolly mammoth within five years.

Mammoths became extinct roughly 10,000 years ago.