Have you ever wondered what it would be like to encounter an animal that lived in the past, such as a seven ton tyrannosaurus rex from the late cretaceous period or a sabre-tooth tiger from the last ice age? Thanks to science, this may happen sooner than you think! How will this be possible? If you are thinking time travel, scientists are nowhere near figuring this one out yet. But what about bringing animals from the past back to life? It turns out that this may be a reality in your lifetime, if not within the next few years! Again, the big question is how. Last week’s blog on genetically modified organism holds the secret. You guessed it, genetic material, material in each cell that causes an organism to inherit certain traits or qualities, is the answer. It turns out that scientists are now able to clone pretty much any organism they want (including humans, but this is against the law!) if they can recover enough genetic material from an organism. 

Does this mean we’ll see dinosaurs roaming the wild in the near future? Not very likely. Genetic material, known as DNA, breaks down over time. This means that it is difficult to get much DNA out of very old fossils. The best way to keep genetic material intact is to freeze it. Not many organisms are frozen and preserved (kept from breaking down in the environment) over time, but some are. Of these, most are found in the Arctic and Antarctic (North and South pole). For example, scientists have found samples of plants that were frozen in the ice in Siberia, part of northern Russia. The plants were over 400 000 years old! 

Of course, most plant or animal fossils aren’t frozen in ice, but every once in a while a really cool discovery is made, like the one recently made by reindeer herder Yuri Khudi in northern Russia. What did he find? Nothing less than a fully intact baby woolly mammoth! (Well almost fully intact, another animal had bitten off its tail long ago!) The six-month old female mammoth lived over 10 000 years ago. It was so well preserved in the ice that scientists think they will be able to gather enough DNA to successfully clone a woolly mammoth! To do this, scientists will place genetic material from the mammoth into an elephant cell (a distant relative of the mammoth) from which they have removed the DNA. Pretty amazing, considering that the very last woolly mammoths lived 5000 years ago!