Lab-grown woolly mammoths could walk the Earth in six years

[Say Hey Kid]

Geneticist George Church gets funding for lab-grown woolly mammoths (cnbc.com)

"A little more than two years ago, serial tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm reached out to renowned Harvard geneticist George Church. The two met in Boston, at Church’s lab, and that fruitful conversation was the catalyst for the start-up Colossal, which is announcing its existence Monday. The start-up’s goal is ambitious and a little bit crazy: It aims to create a new type of animal similar to the extinct woolly mammoth by genetically engineering endangered Asian elephants to withstand Arctic temperatures. The project has been kicking around for years, but nobody had ever given it enough funding to get it off the ground. “We had about $100,000 over the last 15 years, which is way, way less than any other project in my lab, but not through lack of enthusiasm,” Church told CNBC. “It is by far the favorite story. We’ve never done a press release on it in all those years. It just comes up naturally in conversation.”

Click to read more...

 

[beowulf]

How about a lab grown ancient spider done the (yes fake) way of Jurassic Park? lol

Ancient spider caring for offsrping is trapped in amber - CNN

Nothing gets between a fiercely protective mother spider and her children. Dripping tree resin trapped adult female spiders and baby spiderlings about 99 million years ago, forever showcasing the maternal care exhibited by these arthropods, according to new research.
The Lagonomegopidae family of spiders is now extinct, but spiders have a long history and first appeared during the Carboniferous period between 359 to 299 million years ago.
The fossilized Burmese amber pieces tell two different stories. A study detailing the observations of the amber specimens published Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
One "shows a female lagonomegopid spider clutching an egg sac containing eggs about to hatch (you can see the little pre-hatchlings within the egg sac)," said study author Paul Selden, the Gulf-Hedberg Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Kansas, in an email. "This is exactly how a living female spider which is nestled in a crevice in tree bark would look (in this case, right before being swamped with tree resin)."

 

[Cloned]

 

[JMCx4]

The start-up’s goal is ambitious and a little bit crazy: It aims to create a new type of animal similar to the extinct woolly mammoth by genetically engineering endangered Asian elephants to withstand Arctic temperatures.

So how does their "a little bit crazy" goal intend to deal with getting the genetically engineered elephants from the forested regions of India and Southeast Asia to Arctic climes, so the altered population doesn't sweat to death?

 

[Hippasus]

They should also genetically engineer and release many smilodons so the mammoths don't overpopulate the arctic.

EDIT: I was sort of joking, but it sounds like smilodons favored prey smaller than mammoths.

 

[No Fun Shogun]

I don't like this. I'm honestly convinced that once we start bringing back extinct species, public and governmental support for endangered species protection will evaporate with the claim that dead species can just be brought back anyway, ignoring the fact that even if that is the case there's no way that vast majority of species would be revived.

Sure, we'd bring back rhinos and pandas and tigers and gorillas if they went extinct, but for every majorly prominent species there are thousands that wouldn't get much focus.

 

[Bryanbryoil]

How about bringing back something more useful like bigger extinct chicken species so that I don't need to eat 15-20 wings to not still feel hungry?

 

[tarheelhockey]

How about bringing back something more useful like bigger extinct chicken species so that I don't need to eat 15-20 wings to not still feel hungry?

We'd be headed in the wrong direction.

Chicken wings now are MASSIVE compared to 30 or 40 years ago. They used to be dirt-cheap because they were practically useless as a meal, and the dirt-cheapness is what made them so popular as a bar food (after someone figured out that anything tastes good if you bury it in cream and hot sauce). Nowadays they're multiple times bigger and multiple times more expensive.

And this is why we shouldn't bring back wooly mammoths.

 

[Bryanbryoil]

We'd be headed in the wrong direction.

Chicken wings now are MASSIVE compared to 30 or 40 years ago. They used to be dirt-cheap because they were practically useless as a meal, and the dirt-cheapness is what made them so popular as a bar food (after someone figured out that anything tastes good if you bury it in cream and hot sauce). Nowadays they're multiple times bigger and multiple times more expensive.

And this is why we shouldn't bring back wooly mammoths.

I don't know enough about chicken species long before recorded history. That said, I am saying that if there was a subspecies that grew larger and became extinct that would be the ticket to bring back. Modern day meat birds are cross bred and basically force fed to reach those sizes. Many of the birds die of heart attacks too. If there was say a 20lb. species that was around 1 million years ago that would be the ticket.

 

[tarheelhockey]

I don't know enough about chicken species long before recorded history. That said, I am saying that if there was a subspecies that grew larger and became extinct that would be the ticket to bring back. Modern day meat birds are cross bred and basically force fed to reach those sizes. Many of the birds die of heart attacks too. If there was say a 20lb. species that was around 1 million years ago that would be the ticket.

Like Jurassic Park, but chickens

 

[Bryanbryoil]

Like Jurassic Park, but chickens

Hell yeah!

 

[Hippasus]

More reason to not bring back mammoths:

The arctic tundra and steppe where the mammoths lived appears to have been dominated by forbs, not grass. There were richer in protein and easier to digest than grasses and wooden plants, which came to dominate the areas when the climate became wetter and warmer. This could have been a major contributor to why the arctic megafauna went extinct.

The Yamal baby mammoth Lyuba, found in 2007 in the Yamal Peninsula in Western Siberia, suggests that baby mammoths, as do modern baby elephants, ate the dung of adult animals. The evidence to show this is that the dentition (teeth) of the baby mammoth had not yet fully developed to chew grass. Furthermore, there was an abundance of ascospores of coprophilous fungi from the pollen spectrum of the baby's mother. Coprophilous fungi are fungi that grow on animal dung and disperse spores in nearby vegetation, which the baby mammoth would then consume. Spores might have gotten into its stomach while grazing for the first few times. Coprophagy may be an adaptation, serving to populate the infant's gut with the needed microbiome for digestion.

Mammoths alive in the Arctic during the Last Glacial Maximum consumed mainly forbs, such as Artemisia; graminoids were only a minor part of their diet.

Government and-or private investors would probably try to set up an industry to feed these suckers if they managed to release them into the wild.

 

[Elysian]

Doesn't seem like a brilliant idea to bring back a species that needs colder weather given climate change... Bring them back so they can go extinct again? Perfect.