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Scientists are a step closer to bringing the woolly mammoth back from the dead.In an extraordinary Jurassic Park style experiment, they used DNA from an extinct frozen mammoth to bring back to life the major component of mammoth blood.
The prehistoric haemoglobin is shedding new light on how giant creatures survived in the harsh Arctic conditions more than 25,000 years ago.
Researchers believe the same technique could be used to resurrect body parts and proteins from other extinct animals. Prof Kevin Campbell of the University of Manitoba, Canada, who took part in the pioneering experiment said it was the start of a new branch of science.
"The resulting haemoglobin molecules are no different than ‘going back in time’ and taking a blood sample from a real mammoth," he said.
Most mammoths died out 8,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age - although a small group survived for another few thousand years on an island off Russia. In the last few years scientists have been able to piece to together the DNA of the creatures using the bodies of mammoths preserved in Siberian ice.
The latest project began more than seven years ago when Prof Alan Cooper, director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide contacted Prof Campbell to suggest resurrecting mammoth haemoglobin.
″At the time, I thought ‘what a great idea’ – but it’s never going to work,″ says Prof Cooper. ″Still, bringing an extinct protein back to life is such an important concept, we’ve got to try it.″ The team used ancient DNA preserved in bones from Siberian specimens 25,000 to 43,000 years old.
They first isolated the strands of DNA code that contain the instructions for making mammoth haemoglobin by studying modern day elephants - and then found the same genes in mammoth DNA.
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