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What would you do if you saw a wooly mammoth walking down the street? That seems like a silly question because wooly mammoths are extinct. But, it just might be possible (though you probably won’t see one in your neighborhood.) In 1997 a family in Siberia found the long tusks of a wooly mammoth sticking out of the snow. Since then, a French scientist, Bernard Buigues, has begun the task of digging this huge creature out. Amazingly, this 10-foot-tall, 2 ton mammal has been buried under 4 1/2 feet of permafrost for the past 20,380 years! And because it’s been buried in snow and ice, it has been preserved well. This is good news for Bernard Buigues because what he wants to do with the wooly mammoth is use its DNA and clone the animal.

The way he plans to do this is by extracting the nucleus of a cell from the mammoth and inserting it into an empty egg cell. This embryo would then be implanted in the uterus of an Asian elephant which is the closest living relative of a mammoth. That’s the plan anyway, but no one is sure if there will be any undamaged DNA. And even if there is, there are still a lot of decisions to be made. For one, the scientists need to think about how ethical it is to bring back a creature that has been extinct for over four thousand years. That’s a question we should all think about, and we’d love to hear what you think, so write to us!