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Visitor from 39,000 years ago

40 Comments

A 39,000-year-old female woolly mammoth, which was found frozen in Siberia, is displayed to media upon its arrival at an exhibition hall in Yokohama, on Tuesday. The mammoth will be on display from July 13 until Sept 16.

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40 Comments
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Surely such a specimen requires more thoughtful handling. Won't it perish like that?

5 ( +7 / -2 )

Her name is YUKA. If your name has a Yu or Ka in it, you get to go in for half price.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

@Trapped - not sure but it looks rather "perished" to me already.

5 ( +5 / -0 )

Imagine that, long before man started to drive cars and put carbon dioxide into the air, the ice caps melted and formed and certain species died off. So much for Global Warming.

Still, that doesn't mean we can just leave the campground messier than we found it, we should take steps to put control what we put into the environment.

-2 ( +6 / -8 )

It's not dead, it's sleeping - Monty Python.

6 ( +6 / -0 )

female woolly mammoth

this doesn't make sense. how do they know its sex since no one ever seen a live female/male mammoth?? it could be a male. or maybe they were asexual. nobody knows.

-18 ( +0 / -18 )

? you look between its legs... do we really need to be a biologist to figure that one out?

11 ( +11 / -0 )

@calr751 - not so different from an elephant, they know a lot about the physiology of mammoths. It is mammal, not many asexual mammals.

9 ( +9 / -0 )

Bring on the clones!

1 ( +2 / -1 )

I wonder if it's a baby...I mean, I just imagined that mammoths were, you know, larger!

4 ( +4 / -0 )

Her name is YUKA. If your name has a Yu or Ka in it, you get to go in for half price.

Really? Everytime I fire up my bike, my grumpy neighbour addresses me with "You ! Baka !", does that work?

5 ( +6 / -1 )

Meguroman Jul. 10, 2013 - 08:53AM JST

not so different from an elephant, they know a lot about the physiology of mammoths.

and how do they know that? the problem is nobody saw a live mammoth. since nobody saw a live mammoth, nobody knows what a live mammoth looks like. then how do they even know what they have is a mammoth? and how can you possibly find out anything about the physiology of mammoths since they are all dead? it doesn't seem right to make any conclusion about a dead mammoth or whatever the thing is based on the physiology of an elephant. we have live elephants that we can take a sample population from but we don't have any population of live mammoths. it just doesn't seem scientific at all.

-16 ( +0 / -16 )

calr751 - plenty of cave paintings of mammoths. Our ancestors saw them. Other mammothshave been found frozen with vegitation in their stomachs. I'm pretty sure it's not a bird. Or a fish.

4 ( +4 / -0 )

I wanna try CPR on it!!!

0 ( +0 / -0 )

SimondB Jul. 10, 2013 - 10:22AM JST

plenty of cave paintings of mammoths.

cave paintings are not science.

Other mammothshave been found frozen with vegitation in their stomachs.

do you think this is scientifically possible? if they had teeth, they would chew vegetation first. then inside stomach, some chemical reaction that we don't know would damage the chewed vegetation. to stop the chemical reaction instantly, they have to go through an instant death. and then followd by instant preservation of the dead body. it just doesn't add up.

-11 ( +0 / -11 )

Looks pretty small for a mammoth. Was it a baby?

3 ( +3 / -0 )

It's only a matter of time before they clone a mammoth. Harvard professor George Church is even thinking of cloning a Neanderthal baby.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

calr751 and I assume the earth is 2013 years old to you as well?

2 ( +3 / -1 )

Tokiyo Jul. 10, 2013 - 10:43AM JST

I assume the earth is 2013 years old to you as well?

the earth never gets old.

-9 ( +1 / -10 )

calr751-

You know that if you are found quite some time after death and they do an autopsy on you, they can tell with some accuracy what your last meal was and when you ate it? Even if you have teeth and chew your food.

And the scientists do know quite a bit about the 'chemical reactions' that go on inside the stomach. :-)

1 ( +2 / -1 )

cleo Jul. 10, 2013 - 11:18AM JST

they can tell with some accuracy what your last meal was and when you ate it

only when they get lucky. lol.

the scientists do know quite a bit about the 'chemical reactions' that go on inside the stomach.

do they know if mammoths had different stomach that did different chemical reactions that nobody knows about? ha ha ha.

-12 ( +0 / -12 )

Ok calr751 - you've obviously seen through the web of deciet here and I'll admit it's all a big conspiracy. How could anything possibly be 39,000 years old when the earth was only created 6,000 years ago? How we ever thought we were going to get away with it I'll never know.

5 ( +8 / -3 )

@calr751 There have been loads of movies with mammoths in, including the very popular Ice Age movies, which incidentally star a male and a female mammoth. We clearly know a great deal about them.

1 ( +3 / -2 )

since nobody saw a live mammoth, nobody knows what a live mammoth looks like.

calr751, I know how you feel. Nobody has ever seen gravity, and on some Monday mornings, I feel that gravity does not exist; it is just that the world sucks.

But today is Wednesday, so snap out of it.

As a consolation prize, at least we know what a dead mammoth looks like.

7 ( +8 / -1 )

calr571, shall we co-found the flat mammoth society? I'm very bored and can spare the time. And it does look flat, at least for a mammoth.

4 ( +4 / -0 )

cal751, if you payed attention in school, you would know that telling the gender of the mammoth would be as easy as examining the DNA to see if it has XX or XY chromosomes. This is possible because this particular mammoth has very well preserved DNA, it's good enough for a cloning attempt.

However, there is a much easier way to tell if it's male or female, and if you are unable to figure that one out, then I wish you luck in your future reproductive relations, (Hope you don't commit any of your "sins" without knowing)

6 ( +6 / -0 )

Alphaape, yes, it's true that the Earth has gone through many ice ages in the past. However, it is widely accepted without a doubt in the scientific community, that humans are having a big impact on global warming. Yes, some politicians can try to twist words to try and create confusion. However, human impacted global warming is happening without a doubt. By examining ice cores from glaciers which give a history of the atmospheric CO2 in the atmosphere during a long period of Earth's history, it has been found out that atmospheric CO2 has skyrocketed during the last 30 years or so, along with the average global temperature. This warming of the Earth is not matching up with the usual rise in temperatures that have happened in the past, and shows that the Earth is currently outside of the normal temperature changed caused by the Milankovitch cycle.

4 ( +4 / -0 )

You mean to tell me Farmboy, that all this time I have been eating mammoth instead of butternut squash?

2 ( +2 / -0 )

calr751: The answer is quite easy -- by measuring the pelves of the fossils they can determine sex, same as measuring the length of fossil tusks can tell them at what age the mammoths died. And guess what -- some were even frozen and even a few quite well preserved, their junk on display and all. There were males and females -- separate sexes. When it comes to examining skeletal remains they can be compared with elephants since mammoths belonged to the same genus.

Simple science, really.

That aside, I have the same question as trapped -- isn't this surely a very, VERY poor way to display the remains of an ancient creature? I mean, in many museums you aren't allowed to take pictures of paintings or even sculptures with flash because they worry about degredation -- you would think a preserved creature would be kept in a more stable environment.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Many biological museums only display copies or casts made from their collection. Kaiyodo is one such company that specialises in museum displays.

And it looks like a calf.

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

The woolly mammoth is closely related to its North American cousin, the woolly bull; the latter remains relatively obscure despite being celebrated by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs in their immortal "Woolly Bully."

1 ( +1 / -0 )

No!! Extract the DNA and cells first for cloning or it will be another waste body!

1 ( +1 / -0 )

Why the desire to clone? Doesn't darwinism dictate that they have had their run?

0 ( +2 / -2 )

Yeah, cloning this animal raises huge moral issues. It reminds me of a quote from Jurassic Park, "you did it just because you could, but you didn't stop to think if you should." I have very mixed feelings about cloning, even for the more recently extinct animals like the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) for example. Ecosystems have evolved since the demise of many species and nobody knows what the results of reintroducing extinct animals into these environments will do for the ecology of them. We know what happens when they are removed. The reintroduction of the grey wolf in North America has been successful, but it has also put a lot of pressure on farmers and livestock in areas around Yellowstone. Cloning and reintroducing extinct animals into ecosystems is a double edged sword that should be wielded with great caution.

3 ( +3 / -0 )

You have to wonder if wooly mammoths could survive much south of Canada given how warm things are. But it would be interesting and I'm not sure what the harm would be. Now cloning long extinct bacteria would likey backfire and cause a pandemic. But, short of a good stomping, I doubt a wooly mammoth is going to be dangerous.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

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