Free Woolly Out of the Cold

About 20,000 years ago, a very big animal had a very bad day. Deep in Siberia, an 11-ft.-tall woolly mammoth fell over dead. It became entombed in the permafrost, where it remained until last week, when it was finally freed. If scientists have their way, the same mammoth--or rather, its cloned kin--could walk again.

The elephant-like mammoth was discovered in 1997 by a nine-year-old reindeer hunter prowling for decidedly smaller game. In short order, scientists, led by French explorer Bernard Buigues, flocked to the site. What they saw thrilled them.

Mammoths, which vanished some 10,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, had been found before, but rarely in such good shape. To preserve their find, Buigues and his team dug a trench completely around it, freeing a 26-ton block of ice that contained the carcass. Last Sunday a helicopter lifted the block and flew it to a nearby cave, where the beast will be slowly thawed with a hair dryer.

Preliminary analyses of hair, bone and teeth suggest that the animal died 20,380 years ago at a comparatively wizened 47 years--not bad for an animal that wouldn't have lived much beyond 60 anyway. Its overall mass indicates it was a male.

With tons of soft tissue on ice, geneticists have no shortage of mammoth DNA to play out their fantasy: tweeze a bit of it out, insert it into the ovum of an elephant--a close living cousin--and implant the embryo in the elephant's womb. Before long, a woolly bundle should appear.

That's the hope, but it's a long shot, since even frozen DNA tends to deteriorate over time. "No matter how well preserved old DNA looks," says biologist Rob DeSalle of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, "it's probably not."

Alternatively, scientists may try to harvest frozen sperm--provided the mammoth is indeed male--and fertilize a female elephant. Close as the thawed father may be, however, he may not be close enough to produce offspring. "Life isn't something you start and stop like a record," says Ward Wheeler, another biologist at the museum. "It has to go on in continuum."

Even if the beast doesn't yield good science, it should yield good TV. The Discovery Channel partly bankrolled the project, and a documentary chronicling the work is scheduled to air March 12. Daily updates are available at the Discovery website ). Fifteen minutes of fame may take 20,000 years to come along, but come along it nonetheless does.