Could the mammoth make a comeback?

[yortsed snacilbuper]

George Church, a professor of genetics at the Harvard Medical School, oversees a laboratory that is working to insert woolly mammoth genes into Asian elephant cells. He wrote a 2013 article in Scientific American championing the benefits of genetically engineering Asian elephants with mammoth genes, as a first step in resurrecting the mammoth.

It would allow the endangered Asian elephant to expand its range to the Russian and North American Arctic and subarctic areas farther south. In turn, it would help regenerate grasslands and improve biodiversity in tundras, while the roaming elephants would pack down the snow. This pachyderm pack-down would help insulate permafrost and reduce the melting that is causing the release of methane gas, a greenhouse gas that speeds up climate change.

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[Cooley Hurd]

1. Furry elephants ROCK!

But, I'm reasonably sure the first one will see A&E channel and say, "Fuck this shit, put me back down..."

[Warpy]

3. I'd like to spin some of that fur

but I doubt the experiment will be much of a success. They've just been gone too long and a new crop would likely be meaner than snakes and have no idea about what to eat and what to avoid and that they're supposed to be stomping the snowpack, not the villages and villagers.

But yeah, if they look through a window first and see A&E, that will doom them again as they become sucidal and refuse to eat.

[BillZBubb]

2. Even if the idea works, I doubt we'll see a comeback.

A warming climate doesn't bode well for a species that went extinct due in part to a warming climate.

The warming climate will also mean the mammoth's chief threat, humans, will be expanding into whatever cool latitudes are left.

They probably could survive in well protected game preserves, but not in any numbers big enough for the species to remain viable in the wild.