Tag Archives: cloning

Of Mammoths Wild and Woolly

Woolly mammoth skeleton at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Photo by Kevin Burkett.
Woolly mammoth skeleton on display at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Photo by Kevin Burkett.

We love dinosaurs, but we never shared the planet with them. Such was not the case with woolly mammoths, which we once hunted, chowed down on, and used for tools and building materials. You don’t see T-Rexes on cave walls, but some of the earliest sculpture and art by human hands depicts these elephantine throw rugs.

Today, their well-preserved remains contain muscle, blood, teeth, bone, tusk and even brain. We’ve recovered and sequenced mammoth DNA, something we’ll never be able to do with dinosaurs. But if all you know about these majestic creatures comes from old Flintstones episodes, then join me as I explore …

How Woolly Mammoths Worked

The Future: At the Corner of Close and Soon

Aerocar 600 fantasy flying car
Not quite what we had in mind.
(Photo by Joe Mabel)

Somehow the future we get is never quite the one we were promised. Then again, sometimes the very ideas wrapped in the pages of sci-fi and Popular Science are right under our noses, in disguise. After all, we have hand-held sensor-communicators and miraculous supermaterials – they just take the rather mundane form of carbon-fiber-wrapped smartphones.

Maybe our blindness arises from our physical and electronic architecture. Has exchanging Googie buildings for Google caused us to overlook the flying-car equivalents that fill our everyday lives, or soon will? Read on.

Our 10 Favorite Replacements for ‘Where’s My Flying Car?’

Cloning, Hubris and the Dino-DNA “Use By” Date

Be careful what your wish for. Photo by MathKnight and Zachi Evenor.

We know surprisingly little about juvenile dinosaurs, so every time a paleontologist uncovers a clutch of eggs or embryos, it is cause for celebration – at least until someone in the media gets hold of the story and asks The Dreaded Question: “Is Jurassic Park only a few years away?” or some variant thereof.

Being a member of said media, I am occasionally assigned one of these stories. And, although I don’t much care for sensationalism in science coverage, I’m generally too thrilled to be researching dinosaurs and cloning to complain very much. Instead, I see it as an opportunity to tell a deeper story, like this one.

Could we resurrect dinosaurs from fossil embryos?