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I wonder if this will work. After reading in a book about (IIRC) neanderthals that mammoths probably survived to just a few thousand years BP on isolated arctic islands (i.e., missing historical time by a whisker) I had something of a feeling of collectively missing the boat.

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Have you come across Stephen Baxter's Mammoth trilogy, in which the premise is that a small population of mammoths survived until the present day on a remote island north of Siberia? (The second book goes back into prehistory, and has mammoths interacting with Neanderthals and our own ancestors.)

Aware of it but haven't read it...

It might work, but what would be the point, that's what I keep asking myself. I mean, yes, I'd love to see a woolly mammoth or a sabre-toothed tiger etc, but that shouldn't be a good reason for trying to bring them back. The climate and the environment aren't right for them.

I'm not sure it'd be worse than any other zoo or safari park...? I suspect also that part of the reason that mammoths died out on the mainland was because humans killed and ate them, not just climate change. But that's speculation.

Except that we'd be bringing them back purely for entertainment, to look at them. They died out because of a combination of factors, bringing them because we can and because we can look at them, even though the climate isn't right for them and they'll never be able to roam free, it just doesn't seem right to me, even though I'd /love/ to see them.

Oh I do hope this works. I always get so cross when they defrost them without trying to clone them first. Actually, this is one of the things I'd like to do, but I don't speak Russian. I was at one stage putting together a degree in genetics and caving, for this sort of purpose, but they cocked up the accreditation on the caving which diminished the point rather.

I believe the mammoths which survived so long were pygmy mammoths (which seems a bit of an oxymoron), only a metre or so in height. Still, it seems odd to think they were still alive on Wrangell Island and suchlike places at the time people were building Stonehenge or Skara Brae.

Until I went to the Mammoth Site in South Dakota last year, I'd always assumed that all mammoths were of the woolly variety. Those at less chilly latitudes, however, were more like modern elephants in external appearance.

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