Who's ready for mammophants?

I am curious but I don’t think they should. Mammoths are extinct and trying to bring them back to life is a bit like Frankenstein’s attempt to give life to a monstrosity.

I think it is pretty cool if they can do it. Look how long it took before they were able to clone a sheep.
My worry is the few dozen bits of DNA that did not code properly or were damaged by cosmic rays during the 12000 years it was dormant. That piece of DNA might be the code for flame throwing tusks.

Bringing back something that needs a reasonably cool/cold environment when our climate is “changing” and “warming” does not seem like smart thing to do. Poor things will overheat and perish once again from the face of the earth. Bring back something like a velociraptor that can handle the heat.

Well, I’m ready to see it. Hell yeah.

Ethics aside, what would be the purpose?

Pants for tits?
An alternative bra?

I’m down. Science the fuck out of it!

I’d rather them use the money for something else. Doesn’t seem high on the world’s list of priorities.

@Cruiser I would imagine that the work would be done an a much colder environment, like Alaska and Greenland, and not Africa.

I wish that I had the money to buy a mammophant.

Oh, wait, maybe I would if my tax money wasn’t wasted on such schemes. And I have no doubt that tax money is in some way involved.

I’m all for it. The first science articles I wrote were about cloning. http://edition.cnn.com/NATURE/9907/20/cloning.enn/

Would like to see it.

Is there a site where you can sign up to get an email message, or Mammogram, when they are ready to be seen?

Meh.

I think we should wait about 1000 or 2000 years before doing any more GMO or cloning, in order to minimize the accidental suffering and gene pollution, and so we can culturally progress beyond our current savage capitalist all-for-profit madness motivations for doing things, and develop more wisdom and benevolence.

I wouldn’t want to be a mammophant clone generated by mad capitalist scientists trying to learn how to clone animals, with no good plan for what to do with me even if I survive my creation relatively ok. Ideally, in 2000 years or so, yes sure we should by then have most of our land in healthy ecosystems with enough room to try having a prehistoric animal park, and know how to do so responsibly, assuming our superior wisdom at that time deems it is a humane thing to do.

I would be interested in seeing one.

I assume it’d be an herbivore and would treat whatever plants were around as a buffet. Intelligent prehistoric animal gardeners would probably offer a selection of era-appropriate plants.

I don’t know that I’d want to try eating mammoth flesh. I imagine I’d tend to relate to them as I relate to elephants – that is, as people I like and respect more than I do many humans, so I’d probably have an aversion to eating them.

I’ll take two.

These things would make great mascots for women’s health centers: Mammo the Mamophant!

Q: What do you call a female mamophant?

A: Mammy.

What could possibly go wrong?

What do you think could go wrong @Hawaii_Jake? Dolly seemed to work out OK.

Dolly was from an extant animal species. We have no earthly clue what we’re doing by bringing back an animal that has been extinct for thousands of years.

No,but it’s not like Jurassic Park! It would be very, very, very interesting, any way.

Can we just save the elephants that are not extinct yet?

@Zaku helped to convince me to change my mind: Full speed ahead. Where’s my mammophant?

@gorillapaws Call them Mammy and Phanny

I want two as well. Wilma and Betty if they’re females.

Pachyderms get lonely, it’s you have to have at least two.

@ucme, ha ha, PHants, not Pants.

Suppose, if they ARE good eating. Killing one of those, opposed to, what, two dozen cattle, still killing, but wayyyy less. Gawd! What if the whole damn thing tastes like bacon!!!!!!
They also are quite hairy. Perhaps they could be shorn for wool, and maybe I’m not allergic to theirs.
Since they would be a hybrid, maybe they would be warmth resolved, like the elephant portion of their dna.
Here’s another thought.
Elephants ARE related to manatees. Suppose if they could splice a mammoth with that. Manatees that could get back at speeding boat props!
FLING! Cut me again, bitch!

@Cruiser, global warming is expected to lead us rapidly into ice age. Suppose THAT happens? Numerous species would perish in quick wipeout. This could then be the best preservation of mammalian life possible.
Hmmm, I would certainly like to see one, taste one, and try a mammoth sweater.
I am curious to know what they sound like, and if it is loud.
OMG! I just had this thought…
MAMMOTH POOP

I like the way your mind works, @Patty_Melt. Keep workin’ it.

“Oh, I’d like to revive a long dead species so I can eat it, exploit it, or see it imprisoned for my amusement!”

Classical human.

It doesn’t necessarily need to be imprisoned for our amusement, @Sneki95!

They could also be taught to fight each other, or other species, and I’ll bet they’d be great as game animals for nearsighted hunters.

^ That falls under exploitation.

Yes, but fun.

C’mon you guys! They wouldn’t really create mammoths for public use! At least, not in the beginning, until they get hybrids that can reproduce. Then I would imagine they’d be used much like elephants are today, unless they’re poached.

They could live in Pliocene Park with the tigodons, smilogers, and megasloths.

We could end up in quite a pickle.
Suppose they get one…
only one…
and the only way to get more is breed it with an elephant.

Or, what if they create a herd, and find out those suckers have offspring in litters of a dozen or so?

Think of the possibilities when this is introduced … with GMO.

Imagine: a mammoth that lays eggs. Breakfast for weeks!
And though the meaty (at least “bacon-y”) mammoth has apparently been thought of, imagine “spare ribs” that could feed an army. And have leftovers.

Or “service animal” mammoths: blind people could have rides instead of having to walk with dogs. (Or the blind people and their dogs could ride, at least until one of them had to enter, say, a china shop. And that leads to whole new metaphors: a mammoth in a china shop. You heard it here first.)

Hell, a mammoth-beaver cross could fix any damn dam that’s about to burst, and make whole new dams, easy as pie.

Speaking of pie … how about a cross between a mammoth and an apple: One piece of fruit could make the whole gosh darn pie. Maybe several.

And the stories! Why, F. Scott Fitzgerald would have to come back to life (and hell, if we can bring an extinct species back to life, why not an extinct writer?) and write “The Diamond As Big As a Mammoth”. Or he can re-write his own story. I’m not going to be writing it for him.

I’ll be at the mammoth track, watching the races… You’ve heard the sound of horses galloping to finish a race, I suppose. Imagine horses the size of mammoths – with tusks! – racing instead. (The blacksmithing industry would involve heavy equipment just to handle the mammoth horseshoes.)

This could keep me going all weekend.

Well, I for one am super interested in the fact that evolutionary biologists might be able to study the genetic activity in an animal humans made extinct.

I don’t think humans had as much to do with their going extinct as changing climate. We didn’t help, but we weren’t the main cause.

And no. They could never have dozens of offspring! An elephant’s gestation is year and a baby elephant is pretty damn huge!

@Dutchess_III – No, we literally hunted them to death.

@CWOTUS, oh gawd, do! I’m laughing so hard, I peed and cried.
Do another post like that and see where else you can make me leak.

@Seek, it seems you said that somewhat bitterly (maybe I am wrong), but I think bringing back some extict species has many advantages. It is not necessarily just a peek at the past.
What about human races which very suddenly became extinct, about, what was it, fifty thousand years ago?
Suppose we could create MORE racial diversity in our contemporary world. Could that make for a stronger brotherhood? Suppose humans were wiped out, by war, super volcano, or meteor. Suppose a precious few survived, but with not enough diversity to survive for long. Having access to the technology to revive a species could have many advantages.

Zoos these days are not merely a place to gawk at exotic animals. They are places of research, and conservation. They are staffed by people who love Earth’s creatures, and fight for their survival.
Maybe DNA preservation could become a way for the cotinuing of many species. Some from the past, now extinct, could possibly have an opportunity AND a purpose for thriving again.

When did human races become extinct?? Or was that a missprint @Patty_Melt.

I’m 100% yay science on this. If we could bring back the Dodo, that’d be great, too. I might draw the line at genus homo, because fiddling about with sapient species is pretty messy.

@Dutchess_III

She’s probably referring to the Neanderthals.

Oh, yeah. But we were able to interbreed with them, so we have Neanderthal genes flowing through us.

There was also one in South Africa (edited) They suffered the same fate. The name eludes me now. It was Homo naledi,.

No, I speak of the racial bottleneck, obvious as to its occurance, but a total mystery about the cause.
I can’t throw out a link, but googling “human bottleneck” will get you there.
Please, any time someone can provide a link on my behalf, do so. I can’t, and doing it is guarrateed lurve from me, each time.

Human bottle neck
“A population bottleneck (or genetic bottleneck) is a sharp reduction in the size of a population due to environmental events (such as earthquakes, floods, fires, disease, or droughts) or human activities (such as genocide). Such events can reduce the variation in the gene pool of a population; thereafter, a smaller population, with a correspondingly smaller genetic diversity, remains to pass on genes to future generations of offspring through sexual reproduction. Genetic diversity remains lower, only slowly increasing with time as random mutations occur.[1] In consequence of such population size reductions and the loss of genetic variation, the robustness of the population is reduced and its ability to survive selecting environmental changes, like climate change or a shift in available resources, is reduced.”

It may reduce small pockets of humans unable to successfully reproduce, but it never led to the extinction of the entire species. We were too far flung.

I like sabre toothed tigers, mean looking hunks of predatory muscle with their own built in tin openers, the swiss army knife of the extinct animal club.

We need new animals such as mammophants to name our new car models after. I can see it now: The new craze in super-sized vehicles won’t be 4×4 any more. No, that’s passé. The new hot vehicles will be 6×6, double-decker, two-ton amphibious and all-terrain – with tusks (and a trunk, naturally). Welcome to the 2018 Mammophant. (Maybe it can also give birth to hybrids. That would be a nice marketing touch.)

Perfect for super trips to the superstore supermarket to buy … what else? soup.

Marketers need this new animal.

Whole other direction of thinking. Nice.
Going from there, how about job creation?
How many would it take to curry one mammophant? How often would it need to be done?

Would they be docile? If they play rough, what would it take to control them?

They can come here and hang out with these guys. Think of the food and hunting! Yum Yum.
https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskusfe

(Shrill shriek) That is what we call Musk Ox, isn’t it?
I bet they would be great companions! If they don’t eat themselves out of a home.