"All we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth." (Image by Mauricio Antón.)

After 5,000 years of extinction, the Woolly Mammoth may be getting a new lease on life, as Japanese scientists believe they’ll be able to clone the humongous beasts within a few years. It sounds like such a terrible idea. (Thanks Newser.) An excerpt from a Telegraph article about the experiment:

“Previous efforts in the 1990s to recover nuclei in cells from the skin and muscle tissue from mammoths found in the Siberian permafrost failed because they had been too badly damaged by the extreme cold.

But a technique pioneered in 2008 by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology, was successful in cloning a mouse from the cells of another mouse that had been frozen for 16 years.

Now that hurdle has been overcome, Akira Iritani, a professor at Kyoto University, is reactivating his campaign to resurrect the species that died out 5,000 years ago.

‘Now the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth,’ he told The Daily Telegraph.

He intends to use Dr Wakayama’s technique to identify the nuclei of viable mammoth cells before extracting the healthy ones.

‘The success rate in the cloning of cattle was poor until recently but now stands at about 30 per cent,’ he said. ‘I think we have a reasonable chance of success and a healthy mammoth could be born in four or five years.'”