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.
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