In December, Japanese news media said that scientists recovered a seemingly viable sample of bone marrow from a frozen mammoth thigh bone in Russia’s Sakha Republic, and that a mammoth could be cloned back from extinction within five years. This week, Agence France-Presse reported that North-Eastern Federal University is working with the Japanese scientists and with the Koreans. The Beijing Genomics Institute is said to be taking part in the Korean-Russian project as well…

The plan calls for extracting nuclei from the thawed-out mammoth cells, putting them into elephant egg cells and stimulating the cells to start dividing. Embryos would be implanted into elephant wombs for gestation — and if the effort is successful, a mother elephant would give birth to a baby mammoth around 22 months later.

That’s a big “if,” as I wrote in December when I discussed the Japanese-Russian project. In addition to the usual problems surrounding interspecies cloning, it’s highly doubtful that genetic material recovered from tissue that’s been frozen for millennia would be sufficiently intact for extraction and implantation.