Word: mammothly
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About 20,000 years ago, a very big animal had a very bad day. Deep in Siberia, an 11-ft.-tall woolly mammoth fell over dead. It became entombed in the permafrost, where it remained until last week, when it was finally freed. If scientists have their way, the same mammoth--or rather, its cloned kin--could walk again...
...elephant-like mammoth was discovered in 1997 by a nine-year-old reindeer hunter prowling for decidedly smaller game. In short order, scientists, led by French explorer Bernard Buigues, flocked to the site. What they saw thrilled them...
With tons of soft tissue on ice, geneticists have no shortage of mammoth DNA to play out their fantasy: tweeze a bit of it out, insert it into the ovum of an elephant--a close living cousin--and implant the embryo in the elephant's womb. Before long, a woolly bundle should appear...
Alternatively, scientists may try to harvest frozen sperm--provided the mammoth is indeed male--and fertilize a female elephant. Close as the thawed father may be, however, he may not be close enough to produce offspring. "Life isn't something you start and stop like a record," says Ward Wheeler, another biologist at the museum. "It has to go on in continuum...
...cattily of the absence of Governor George W. Bush from Thursday night's Republican candidates' town meeting in New Hampshire. But then, as Senator Orrin Hatch quickly jabbed, Forbes is sufficiently endowed by his family fortune to avoid the trawling for millions among the special interests. Governor Bush's mammoth war chest provided the only hint of combativeness in a field of candidates, most of whom already look like also-rans, but with "Dubya" out of range, they were firing...