I’ve recently developed a bit of a thing for woolly mammoths since hearing about them being dug up from the frozen tundras of Siberia and Alaska. What’s amazing to me is that they actually shared the planet with us modern day humans who it seems also had a bit of a thing for them - because they made the effort to draw them on the walls of their caves. They also liked eating them and making them into blankets. In fact, the last known living populations of mammoths were still wandering around the remote Wrangel island (off the coast of Russia) while the Egyptians were perfecting the art of pyramid building roughly 4,000 years ago. Because of their size and the fact that they liked hanging out in the frozen wastes, we know more about this prehistoric animal than any other creature from the Pleistocene epoch. Unlike fossil remains, mammoth bodies dug from the ice still have preserved soft tissue and hair - allowing us to study not only their skeletons and teeth but also to look at their stomach contents, dung and hair. In recent years there seems to have been a spate of our woolly pals being levered out of the permafrost. And in 2013, Russian scientists claimed to have successfully extracted liquid blood from a 10,000 year old specimen. Immediately some people began to raise the prospect of ‘de-extinctifying’ the mammoth. Horrendous mangling of the English language aside, science is still a long way off being able to clone a mammoth from recovered DNA - but suppose it were possible? A team of scientists from Harvard lead by Professor George Church claims to be just two years away from being able to create a hybrid embryo in which mammoth traits would be programmed into an Asian elephant (the mammoth’s closest living relative) a ‘mammophant’ would have genetically modified small ears, a thick layer of insulating fat and long shaggy hair… Cool right? Possibly… just because you can do something does that mean that you should? There are huge ethical questions that loom into view when these sorts of issues are raised. Religious fundamentalists might be concerned that it is not our place to play God… but they are contradicting themselves because they don’t believe in evolution which suggests mammoths presumably have never existed - so they can get lost for a start. Do we even need mammoths? Well no, but do we need Pandas? No, but they’re fun to have around aren’t they? With these scientific/ethical questions I have developed what I call the dinner party test that seeks to clarify these arguments. You simply have to ask ‘would you invite them back?’ Mammoths were great company and should be given an open invite. But prehistoric massive sharks such as the Meglodon are hugely anti-social and left a terrible mess last time they were over… so no.