This bone found in Siberia could help resurrect the woolly mammoth
Because Jurassic Park taught us nothing, scientists are attempting to clone a woolly mammoth and bring the long-extinct beast back to life.
But first, they need some DNA.
In Travel Channel’s Expedition Unknown: Woolly Mammoth, a team of international scientists ventures into the frigid climes of Russia’s Siberian permafrost to find the ancient genetic remains.
In the first episode, which airs Dec. 28 at 9 p.m. ET, the group unearths the leg bone of an adult male mammoth that was buried in the ice for the past 200,000 years. Then they literally hack their way into the bone’s core to extract well-preserved marrow, which they’ll take back to a lab in South Korea.
Woolly mammoths roamed the Earth for hundreds of thousands of years and weighed as much as 6 tons — about the same size as modern African elephants.
The last of the woolly mammoths disappeared some 4,000 years ago, possibly due to overhunting or because of changes in their food supply following the last Ice Age.
Expedition Unknown is part of the Travel Channel’s “Chill-cation” programming event, which airs Dec. 25-31 and features ice-themed episodes from the network’s most popular series.
