The Pleistocene Park?

An amazing breakthrough may allow us to have woolly mammoths and other extinct animals running around again. Michael Crichton was a true visionary.

An international team has sequenced the nearly complete mammoth genome using hair samples from the shaggy beasts that had been frozen in the Siberian permafrost. The team, led by Stephan Schuster and Webb Miller at the Pennsylvania State University, describe the feat -- which makes the mammoth the first extinct creature to be sequenced -- in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

Resurrecting the iconic creature would not be easy, but scientists say genetic and reproductive technology is advancing so quickly that the idea of bringing the mammoth back to life is not as implausible as it sounds. As a first step they say mammoth look-alikes could be genetically engineered by adding genes for giant tusks and shaggy coats to modern-day elephants.

"For all practical purposes you could certainly have something that looked like a mammoth," says geneticist Hendrik Poinar, at McMaster University in Hamilton, who would like to see more debate about the ethics of resurrecting extinct animals. "There need to be rules in place."

Mr. Poinar says it may not be long before someone tries to build a theme park based on the Pleistocene era, which ended about 10,000 years ago.

"The Pleistocene Park would be a big money maker," with "the woolly mammoth ride" and "the sabre-toothed tiger run," Mr. Poinar said in an interview.