Eli5 if Woolly Mammoths we’re perfectly preserved in ice, how come we can’t extract samples of eggs and sperm and implant them in an elephant/artificial woolly mammoth uterus
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* Eggs must be, to use a simple term, ‘ripe’ in order to be fertilisable. I don’t know how elephant/mammoth ovarian cycles work, but in humans, only a single egg becomes mature in a typical cycle, so for IVF we give drugs to stimulate the ovaries to make more mature eggs.
* Obviously this stimulation can’t be done in a mammoth, so no guarantee that you could even find a good egg, let alone one that’s intact and the DNA isn’t heavily damaged.
* The success rate of IVF is small. If you collect 10 mature eggs, you might get 3 or 4 embryos actually get to day 5 of development. Or you might get none. Depends on a lot of factors.
* No one has ever successfully performed IVF on an elephant.
* It’s unlikely that a mammoth embryo could successfully implant in a modern elephant, without some kind of modifications going on.
Ever take a nice crisp vegetable and freeze it, and when you thaw it out it’s a mushy mess
Same problem.
Freezing and thawing things destroys their cellular structure.
Imagine cells as being basically tiny water-balloons. When you freeze them, the ice-crystals pierce and pop them, and when they thaw out they simply fall apart at a cellular level.
Some animals have evolved a natural anti-freeze which prevents this happening. Various species of fish, and some frogs and other amphibians will wait out winter by allowing themselves to freeze and thaw out in spring non-the-worse for wear.
The upshot is that the mammoths don’t have this ability, and if you try and retrieve their DNA, most if not all of their cells are destroyed. Good luck with that.
**However**
Despite the challenges, some DNA has actually been recovered from Mammoths, and there are multiple groups of people actively attempting to do exactly what you describe.
Current projections are that we’ll have Elephant/Mammoth hybrids being born in a few years. But I’ll believe it when I see footage of the calves..
So woolly mammoths are not perfectly preserved in ice. They are unexpectedly well preserved compared to what you expect from a 800 thousand years old corpse. Some of them even look as good as if they were dead only for decades. It’s miraculously good state for something that’s dead since so long. Still it’s a state of decay that’s way beyond any hope for revival.
I’m pretty sure that’s happening right now. The dodo bird and woolly mammoth are being brought back from extinction if I read an article right. The dodo is already on the way and they expect the first woolly mammoth by 2028.
We don’t even have working artificial uteruses for species that are alive now that we can take huge amounts of measurements from, even the one that’d be in most demand (humans!). We’re not going to magic up an artificial wooly mammoth uterus any time soon.
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