Adventure Ausrama Blog

It seems researchers are close to cloning the woolly mammoth and perhaps a species of frog that gives birth to offspring with its mouth - swallowing fertile eggs then incubating them in its mouth. The frog died out in 1983. We have heard claims like this before. Personally, I believe we are a long way from being able to do this. Repairing the damage that pushed them to extinction is not sufficient to bring them back. Finding specimens with suitable preserved material is near impossible. Even the few frozen southern gastric-brooding frogs were not initially preserved with the intention of "cloning". Special techniques were not applied. It is thought improved systems like somatic cell nuclear transfer will enable creation of a living frog. Some presume this can be used on viable mammoth cells. The issue will be producing a healthy living creature. Previous research has resulted in incomplete clones: many do not live long. Most scientists are pessimistic about the poss...

We have heard so much about how scientists are going to clone a mammoth. For many this idea remains "pie in the sky" - a lot of talk and no action. There is plenty of mammoth raw material around to do tests on. The problem is getting good DNA that can be cloned. Scientists are jumping up and down again with the recent find of a frozen mammoth in Siberia. They say this time their will be "living cells". This is very optimistic. The new mammoth will probably be like all the others. Only partial DNA will be found. Even though bone marrow has been identified this time, cloning is a long shot. No living cells have so far been found in any extinct animal, as far back as 10,000 years when mammoths roamed the Earth. There are problems in analyzing human DNA even though the human genome is known. The complete DNA of mammoths has not yet been determined. A prize is offered by the X Prize Foundation for the first cloned extinct animal. Scientists can hope I s...

Elephants aren't so different from woolly mammoths. DNA samples taken from mammoth hair shows they are much alike. Furthermore, there are indications that the mammoth population was so low toward the end that inbreeding took place. If the unique mammoth genome can be isolated it can be inserted into elephant DNA to produce a woolly mammoth. It has also been found that differentiation between mammoth was only minor, so that a disease could have easily wiped them out. Mammoth are more closely related to elephants than chimpanzees are to humans, which is about 99 percent. Evidence shows that there were two groups of mammoth. One group died out 45,000 years ago, the other 10,000 years ago. http://www.adventure--australia.blogspot.com/ http://www.tysaustralia.blogspot.com/ http://www.feeds.feedburner.com/AdventureAustralia http://www.technorati.com/blogs/ http://adventure--australia.blogspot.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Science

Humans destroy more things in the environment than climate change. This is especially the case in Australia where over the last 50,000 years people have wiped out the county's megafauna. Before Aboriginals arrived flightless birds, large reptiles and giant marsupials lived a carefree existence. Humans slaughtered the large animals in a very short period of time. More accurate dating of bones shows that megafauna died out abruptly. When the giant creatures were in large numbers there is no evidence of human tools. After the Diprotodon, Australia's largest marsupial, large kangaroos and flightless birds died out stone tools appeared. Accurate dating shows they did not exist at the same time even though they were found together at certain locations. When humans became settled the large animals were gone. The odd thing is that humans and megafauna must have coexisted for at least 5,000 years. But this is a very narrow window to find evidence of both living side by side. This gives...