A real, live mammoth would be really cool to see. Maybe instead of a Jurasic Park, they can do an Ice Age park!

It'll be a lot easier to come up with a "Pleistocene Park" than a Jurassic one. Amazingly, they actually have managed to extract bits of DNA from dinosaur fossiles, but (as I understand it) we're talking tiny fragments, less than 1/10th of 1% of even one chromosome, if that.

Again, as I recall (read Scientific American years ago about this) the stuff they actually pull out of amber is more extensive but every bit as fragmented.

Compare with, say, a mammoth, where we may end up getting really lucky and finding complete or nearly complete zygote cells.

That is just freaky. Im not sure its a great idea to bring back a prehistoric creature. We have no real idea of what thier behaviors are, living conditions, etc. I know that behaviors can be learned but it is still a wild animal and a damn big and dangerous one at that. Why bring an animal back that we do not know how to accurately have live in captivity and will only suffer from our ignorance.

Again, this is not like a dinosaur. There are several very close relatives to the mammoth wandering around today. Close enough that I'd wager neither the mammoth nor the elephants raising it would really know the difference.

Compare with dinosaurs, whose closest living relatives are birds, which are so different it took nearly 150 years for us to even accept they MIGHT be related.

Mamalians are pretty well represented in modern populations. Pretty much anything from the Cenozoic (66.4 mya) to the present is still represented in one form or another, which means, in theory at least, it's a *lot* safer to bring one of them back.

Also, we've been hunting mammoth, mastodon, cave bear, saber tooth, etc. even when they were as common as fleas. We know how to fight them. Dinosaurs are a different thing.

I think I agree with Carrie. Sometime just because you can doesn't mean you should. I haven't hunted mastodons, saber tooth tigers, or cave bears lately. I have, however, been bitten by a Veteran at work. Very similiar situation I think. LOL