#wooley mammoth

In case you haven’t heard, a 10,000 year old mammoth carcass found in Russia reportedly contains mammoth blood. After this discovery was made, the internet was rampant with declarations that now we would be able to “clone” a mammoth and bring this long extinct species back to life. How far-fetched is this? Well, that statement may as well be out in space. DNA begins to break down at death, so paleogeneticists would likely draw only scraps of genetic material from the mammoth. Then they would try to place those scraps into a DNA patchwork of the best approximation of what we think a mammoth’s genome would be like.

The result would not be a resurrected woolly mammoth genome; it would be modern science’s best approximation of mammothness.

That’s to say nothing of actually creating a baby mammoth. Researchers could try to manipulate the sex cells of modern Asian elephants—the closest living relatives to mammoths—to get a mother Asian elephant to carry a mammoth baby, or genetic engineers could alter the genome of elephants bit by bit until they reverse-engineered a living hypothesis of a woolly mammoth.

But researchers are not even close to those experimental steps.

Photograph courtesy of Semyon Grigoryev, Northeastern Federal University/AFP/Getty Images, and National Geographic.