Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/11/13/perfectly-preserved-cave-lion.html
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“It’s still hungry. Hurry up with that baby mammoth clone already!”
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I’m a fan of Scott Sigler, love Ancestor… so this leaves me feeling uneasy 
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Weren’t cave lions … really huge? It seems like a bad idea to re-introduce an extra big predator when we’re already destroying species left and right.
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Russian scientists + Siberian Times = Bat Boy.
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OK, I’m no expert but this kind of raises my suspicions a bit. What does the superficial external structure of the specimen have to do with its suitability for cloning? Shouldn’t the real question be whether any DNA fragments survived relatively intact?
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Who knows what these guys are supposedly talking about: probably a prop from 30,000 B.C., but what we now know is that a lion is a lion is a lion, including what was once called the Giant Jaguar. Lion subspecies do seem to respond to colder climates by becoming bigger. The largest extant, I believe, is the Ethiopian lion, while the largest ever was actually the European lion.
Pass the ketchup!
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Someone get Jeff Goldblum on the phone to give these guys a talking to.
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Fifi, where have you been hiding?
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If it’s frozen like that, you have billions of perfectly intact cells to harvest DNA from. They’ve gotten DNA from fossils.
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From what I understand they’re still a long way from getting anything close to an intact DNA strand from long extinct mammals. The problem has been described as trying to reconstruct a novel that’s been broken down into a random mix of individual words.
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To be fair, although the first news broke well over a decade ago, there has been recent statements with cloning Woolly Mammoths:
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OK just one thing. Don’t patch it up with frog DNA. promise me, ok?
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If this is so close to being reality, why aren’t we trying to resurrect recent extinctions, or bolster species on the edge of extinction when husbandry isn’t helping?
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Eighteenth-century preservationists forgot to convince a dodo, a passenger pigeon and a Steller’s sea cow to climb up on top of a glacier and freeze to death in 1768.
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its “perfect” condition makes it a potential candidate for cloning.
They said that about me, and look at me now!
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I’m sure they’ll keep in a cage, with a state-of-the-art security perimeter and maybe on an island. They’ll spare no expense.
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Flat cat, why is that cat so flat? Poor pussy looks like maybe a mammoth stomped on him/her/it.
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