Amazing 15,000 year old mammoth!

As for the bison numbers, the text book line is that it was the arrival of the European settlers which took numbers down from several million to 50!

That Bison Bill geezer killed a fair few.

What’s the difference between a Bison and a Buffalo?

Is no one else in this thread (apart from maybe the OP) interested in the fact that they poked a hole in a 10,000 year old mammoth AND BLOOD GUSHED OUT!!!!!?

No, I’m with you grum. It’s pretty astonishing but as you can’t blame the Tories or be racist about it, it’s going to get no lookin here!

What’s the difference between a Bison and a Buffalo?

adopts aussie accent.. you can’t wash your hands in a buffalo.

😆

Reducing numbers in general really, just feeling of late it is rarther busy around here.
Have you been out of town recently. Or left the country and travelled anywhere.

There is space, literally, everywhere.

Loads of it, you can barely move for open space.
But none of it the correct environment for mammoth or mastodon. Remains found of the last mastodon known on a Russian island indicate that environmental changes meant that the animals were significantly smaller. Did nobody else watch the Ice Age Giants series? Alice Roberts rock climbing in a tight vest… Mmmmmmm.
Oops, sorry…

But none of it the correct environment for mammoth or mastodon

That’s an entirely different argument from making out that the world is totally full just because you can’t get a seat on the tube during the rush hour though isn’t it.

The simpler argument is that we’ve got species becoming endangered/going extinct today- why bring back one that went extinct millenia ago when we’re not even doing enough to keep the existing ones alive?

Because it kicks ass, is the correct answer, but scientists don’t like admitting that’s the reason, it’s not very sciency.

Meh – ignoring the entirely superfluous stuff about climate change, IF they were hunted to extinction that means only one thing… Mammoth is VERY tasty. Better than anything else that wasn’t hunted to extinction. FACT!

thepurist – Member
Meh – ignoring the entirely superfluous stuff about climate change, IF they were hunted to extinction that means only one thing… Mammoth is VERY tasty….

Visions of a herd of dairy mammoths… 🙂

The simpler argument is that we’ve got species becoming endangered/going extinct today- why bring back one that went extinct millenia ago when we’re not even doing enough to keep the existing ones alive?

Cloning an animal in a lab is a hell of a lot easier than stopping habitat loss around the world!

epicyclo – Member
Visions of a herd of dairy mammoths…

Imaging the height of the milking parlours!! 😯

molgrips – Member

Cloning an animal in a lab is a hell of a lot easier than stopping habitat loss around the world!

It is. But why do something easy and irrelevant when there’s important difficult work to be done?

(OK, the counterargument is that if this works for mammoths, it’ll work for anything else you have DNA for so you can restore other extinct species. But that doesn’t strike me as a healthy line of thought)

Edit: Just seen the pics now!

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/05/29/wooly-mammoth-blood-recovered-from-frozen-carcass-russian-scientists-say/

The people who are sat in a lab messing with DNA aren’t the same people who’ll decide on or enforce agricultural and industrial practices around the world, or who’ll stop us all from using too many fossil fuels….

molgrips – Member

The people who are sat in a lab messing with DNA aren’t the same people who’ll decide on or enforce agricultural and industrial practices around the world, or who’ll stop us all from using too many fossil fuels….

Of course not. But the funding to make Wooly Mammoth Park could be put there.

I expect that if they make one they’d keep it in a zoo. I doubt they’d make a whole herd and create a big park for them.

Could they make a boy mammoth and a girl mammoth, then (if they loved each other very much) there might one day be more…

Care to make this more exciting with a small wager? 10 of my finest scottish pence…

Course, it doesn’t have to be an either/or but resurrecting the dead while failing to protect the living just seems fundamentally wrong to me. There’s 3 breeds of elephant currently alive, one is critically endangered. This seems like getting excited over a novelty while failing to take care of everyday business.

It is exactly that. But the novelty is possible, the everyday business is astronomically difficult and will take many many years. It needs the co-operation of billions of people.

molgrips – Member

But the novelty is possible, the everyday business is astronomically difficult and will take many many years. It needs the co-operation of billions of people.

Give it a few more years and we can clone sumatran elephants back from extinction- and that’s something that wouldn’t need billions of people to improve today.

Now that’s a piece of logical thinking.

Take that a little further and there’s no point caring for anything at all as in the future, there will be a way to fix it….

Take that a little further and there’s no point caring for anything at all as in the future, there will be a way to fix it….

Hope so. I’ll need a new body in about 25 years.

tinybits – Member

Now that’s a piece of logical thinking.

Ah, wasn’t very clear there- my point was that we can’t use the “will take years” approach with some near-extinct species because they don’t have years. (if cloning extinct animals back from extinction is sexier than saving them from extinction, we’re on the right track)