MOSCOW, October 8 – RIA Novosti. Yakut biologists and geneticists discovered during an expedition to the lower reaches of the river Yan skin and some other remains of mammoths, which potentially can be used in genetic experiments to create a “hybrid” elephant and the mammoth, the press service of the North-Eastern Federal University.
The expedition, named “North Oecumene”, was organized with the assistance of the Russian Geographical Society in August this year, when a group of paleontologists, biologists and geneticists at direction of Semyon Grigoriev, Director of the Museum of Mammoth in Yakutsk.
“Lyakhovsky Islands are considered to be the center of the mammoth continent. Here the world’s greatest concentration of remains of mammoths, so we chose this area to carry out spot investigations” – says Grigoriev, whose words the press service of the university.
© Photo: George Teichmann
During the month of excavations in this archipelago, scientists were able to find six carcasses of mammoths, including the unique pattern of the skin, which can become raw material for experiments on transplanting mammoth DNA into cells elephants cleared of genetic material, which will be held in the framework of the project “Revival of the mammoth” together with Korean geneticists.
In addition to the potential base for cloning “business card” megafauna Siberia, Russian paleontologists also managed to find the remains of wonderful pygmy mammoth, whose height did not exceed two meters. Now Yakut paleontologists, according to Grigoriev, trying to understand whether this is an anomaly or a representative specimen of special populations of these animals.
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