Woolly mammoth may walk the Earth again in four years!

Researchers have been working for more than a decade to bring the long extinct woolly mammoth back to life.

The first serious attempt to bring back the mammoth—a creature extinct for 5,000 years—failed. Although cells were successfully harvested from mammoths found frozen in the Siberian tundra, the critical cellular nuclei needed to bring the animals back to life were severely damaged from the cold.

The Japanese have been at the forefront in the project to return woolly mammoths to the land of the living. It’s been a dream bordering on an obsession for some of the research teams focused on the goal to resurrect extinct life.

Now a critical breakthrough in the quest for living mammoths has been achieved because of a revolutionary technique introduced by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology. Wakayama succeeded creating a living, healthy mouse with cells cloned from another mouse that was dead—and frozen—for more than 16 years.

Protocols to bring back the mammoth have been in place for some time. The final hurdle was how to successfully clone the animal from the frozen cells that are available. Wakayama’s cloning technique seems to provide the solution to that dilemma.

“Now the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth,” Akira Iritani, a professor at Kyoto University, told the Daily Telegraph during an interview with the newspaper.

Iritani is preparing to return to Siberia for more mammoth cells and believes the creature will walk the Earth again in only four years…

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