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Darwin 200: Let's make a mammoth

Nature volume 456, pages 310–314 (2008)Cite this article

A Correction to this article was published on 07 January 2009

Evolution assumes that extinction is forever. Maybe not. Henry Nicholls asks what it would take to bring the woolly mammoth back from the dead.

In 1990 the late Michael Crichton gave the idea of reviving extinct species a slickly plausible and enormously entertaining workout in his novel Jurassic Park. At that time the longest genome that had ever been sequenced was that of a virus. The best part of 20 years on, hundreds of animal genome sequences have been published. This week, for the first time, the genome of something undoubtedly charismatic and definitively extinct joins the list: the mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius)1. If you want to bring a species back to life, the mammoth would be almost as dramatic as a dinosaur. And unlike Tyrannosaurus rex, the mammoth has close living relatives to lend a hand.

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Authors
  1. Henry Nicholls
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See also pages 281, 295, 330 and 387, and online

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Darwin 200 news special

Mammoth site at Hot Springs, South Dakota

Michael Crichton

Svante Pääbo's research

The Elephant's Guide to Sex

Henry Nicholls

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Nicholls, H. Darwin 200: Let's make a mammoth. Nature 456, 310–314 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/456310a

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