Rocked and Loaded
AH fanatic
“That guy” is Jack Horner, one of the most famous paleontologists of the late 20th century. He was also the paleontology advisor for Jurassic Park. I’m be had the pleasure of meeting him a couple times.
He came and gave his chicken talk when his book came out at the museum I work for. The work is definitely interesting. Moreso in that it demonstrates the latent non avian dinosaur traits still present in modern bird genomes.
Technically birds are dinosaurs so any creature you developed from chickens would still count. Though by playing semantics, hunting dove counts as hunting dinosaurs without all the labwork! It just wouldn’t be a Velociraptor mongolianensis or what have you, as you correctly stated earlier.
Anyhow, I completely agree that any claims to attempt to produce a mammoth are overstated. They also ignore some basic ecological facts when it comes to rewilding. I would hazard to guess that most, if not all, mammoths preserved in the tundra are woolly mammoths. Wooly mammoths ranged in northern latitudes (hence their occasional preservation in ice) however the correct mammoth to rewild the US with is the Colombian mammoth which was adapted to a warmer, more Southernly range.
All this talk of rewilding with cloned mammoths is about the wrong mammoth!
Wooly mammoth range in blue, Columbia’s mammoth range in red.
