A couple of Japanese scientists are hoping to bring back the woolly mammoth -- prehistoric monsters 9 feet tall with huge, curving tusks.
Related to the modern elephant, mammoths were covered with thick, shaggy, long hair. No doubt, a mammoth would make the most amazing zoo display so far.And the idea isn't as far-fetched as it sounds.
In fact, a Brigham Young University pioneer in the study of ancient DNA, Scott Woodward, already has re-created the sequence of one gene from a Utah mammoth.
Mammoths once ranged throughout the northern latitudes of Europe, Asia and North America.
The most famous Utah version of a mammoth, one of the Columbia mammoth species, was found in 1988 on top of the Wasatch Plateau. Because it was near Huntington Reservoir west of the town of Huntington, it's called the Huntington mammoth.
Its well-preserved bones and tusks are displayed in a climate-controlled lab at the College of Eastern Utah's Prehistoric Museum in Price. A cast of the skeleton is mounted in the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah.
Mammoths died out about 10,000 years ago when the Pleistocene ended and man became much more adept at hunting big beasts. A popular theory is that our ancestors' overhunting led to their demise.
Kazufumi Goto, formerly of Japan's Kagoshima University, and Akira Iritani, chairman of the department of genetic engineering at Kinki University in Japan, are on a hunt for mammoth remains -- not to chew around the campfire but to supply genetic material that could help re-create the beasts. (An article about their efforts is in the April issue of Discover Magazine.)
Picking through tundra in Siberia, they are trying to find either reproductive cells or other tissue of mammoths. Goto and Iritani are considering two different approaches -- artificial insemination with mammoth eggs or sperm to create a mammoth-elephant cross, then breeding animals that had more characteristics of mammoths; and cloning.
How could tissue from an animal that died 10,000 years ago remain either fertile or complete enough to clone?
Mammoths lived in such hostile regions that they frequently fell to their deaths in crevasses, broke through ice on lakes or died in blizzards. The carcasses would freeze, to be discovered millennia later.
Tales abound of explorers finding mammoth remains and feeding meat to their sled dogs. Sometimes organs, vegetation, lungs and other features are well preserved.
Many of the world's museums preserve mammoth tissue discovered frozen in the permafrost of Siberia and Alaska.
The Zoological Museum of the Zoological Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, exhibits two specimens of preserved mammoths from Siberia:
-- An adult, called the Berezovka mammoth, looks as if it's about to climb right out of a pile of rocks that trapped him -- but he looks so good because of help from the taxidermists. His head had been chewed by predators; the rest of the body was more intact.
-- A baby mammoth called Diva, discovered in 1971, looks like a flattened little elephant, and doesn't seem to be the beneficiary of plastic surgery.
If Goto and Iritani locate a mammoth preserved as nicely as these, will they have a chance?
"I think the feasibility is way, way low, but not necessarily because it's a mammoth," said Woodward, speaking by telephone from his lab at BYU. The difficulty is "because of just the plain technical problems that are associated with trying to manipulate about 3 billion nucleotides," the molecules that link up to form DNA.
Each mammoth cell would have these 3 billion nucleotides, he said.
"That's difficult to do with a living organism," but with a deceased animal it'd be even more difficult to deal with.
"DNA begins to degrade immediately upon death," he said. It would be extremely unlikely "to get something from a mammoth that's 10,000, 20,000 or 40,000 years old."
That's not to say it's impossible.
Several years ago, Woodward experimented with a sliver of bone from the Huntington mammoth.
"One of the things we've done in our laboratory is actually reconstruct a whole gene" from the mammoth, he said. "We thought that was a phenomenal accomplishment."
The BYU scientists re-created a mammoth gene called Cytochrome B, stitching it together from six pieces.
Woodward was able to compare sequences from the gene with those in Asian and African elephants. "Not surprisingly, it turned out to be more closely related to the Asian elephant than it was to the African elephant."
Dan Chure, paleontologist at Dinosaur National Monument (based near Jensen, Uintah County), said cloning mammoths isn't as ridiculous an idea as the "Jurassic Park" notion of cloning dinosaurs.
"Certainly, with more recent material like that you may well have more genetic material to work with," he said. Cloning mammoths "is a possibility."
Presumably, Goto and Iritani would have to find a new frozen mammoth, he said. If they do, they may find extraordinary preservation of tissue in the frozen carcass. "Some of those things still had plant materials in their stomachs," Chure said. "Their last meals were there."
To understand the relative freshness of mammoth and dinosaur DNA, consider that mammoths died out 10,000 years ago while the last dinosaur made the ground shake 65 million years ago. So dinosaur DNA is 6,500 times more stale than that of the most recent mammoths.
The difference is like unwrapping a loaf of French bread and leaving it on the cutting board for one day, or leaving it there more than 17 years.
"Kind of an interesting prospect," said Frank DeCourten, for many years paleontologist at the Utah Museum of Natural History. Today he is a professor at Sierra College, Calif., and the recent author of "Dinosaurs of Utah."
"The idea certainly seems technologically feasible, particularly in the wake of successful experiments with Dolly (the sheep cloned from an adult sheep cell), and other creatures these days." The biggest challenge would be to find a complete set of mammoth DNA.
That would depend on the preservation of the remains in Siberia, according to DeCourten. He thinks it "very unlikely they'll find suitable material, but not impossible . . . . They have a chance to find appropriate material."
If this can succeed, it would pave the way to bring back other supposedly-extinct species, he noted.
Mammoth DNA may be so degraded that with today's technology it would be impossible to piece it together again. But the technology is constantly improving.
Twenty years ago, nobody could have replicated genetic material from mammoths. But with the development of the polymerase chain reaction -- a technique to make limitless copies of stretches of DNA -- all that changed. The technique was demonstrated in 1985 and since has become an essential tool in DNA research.
"You can say it's absolutely impossible today, and tomorrow it's a whole new ball game," Woodward said. "Today the likelihood of reconstructing a mammoth I think is extremely, extremely low," Woodward added. "Tomorrow those odds could change."