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Mammoth blood?
,A May 13 photo provided by the Yakutsk-based North-Eastern Federal University shows a researcher working near a partial carcass of a female mammoth found on a remote island in the Arctic Ocean. Russian scientists claim that blood has been extracted from the carcass.
Mammoth blood? Siberian discovery sparks some wild and woolly claims
By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News
Russian researchers say they've recovered blood samples from a 10,000-year-old mammoth carcass found in Siberia, but outside experts are skeptical about the claims — and particularly about suggestions that the mammoth can be cloned.
"What makes the news here is that they have the liquid," Stephan Schuster, a biologist at Penn State who helped decode the woolly mammoth genome several years ago, told NBC News. "But this could also be water that is now thawing and is running out with organic compounds that are in the carcass."
The research team from North-Eastern Federal University in the Siberian city of Yakutsk says it's blood.
"The blood is very dark," Semyon Grigoriev, who headed the expedition to the Lyakhovsky Islands in the Siberian Arctic, said Wednesday in a university news release.
"It was found in ice cavities below the belly, and when we broke these cavities with a poll pick, the blood came running out. Interestingly, the temperature at the time of excavation was -7 to -10 degrees C [14 to 19 degrees Fahrenheit]. It may be assumed that the blood of mammoths had some cryoprotective properties," he said.
It's difficult for Schuster or other outside experts to render judgment on the claims, since the only information available on the find is what's in the press. "I have no doubt that they have found something interesting, but what exactly it is ... is hard to say at this moment," Daniel Fisher, an expert on mammoths at the University of Michigan, told Scientific American's Kate Wong.
Schuster said it's conceivable that the fluid contains natural antifreeze. Experts have found that to be the case for lots of modern-day organisms in chilly environments. "It could come from the breakdown of biopolymers," he said. "You have a lot of small organic components that would have the properties of being cryoprotective."
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