A Bit Woolly, and Quite Dead

A baby mammoth which fell into "an ice age muddy river some 40,000 years ago" has been exhumed only to fall victim to the Holocene-age muddy prose of the Guardian's environment correspondent. The mammoth's body was almost perfectly preserved thanks to a "biological twist of fate"; namely the fact that it "became quickly wrapped in frozen sediment". A lesser scientist than the Guardian's environment correspondent, even assuming he was a fellow graduate of the Barbara Cartland school of audience disapathy solicitation, might have referred to this as a geological twist of fate. The Guardian's environment correspondent dismisses one theory about the reasons for the mammoths' extinction as "an echo of modern concerns about climate change", and appears to believe that another theory blames "early human hunters"; presumably Homo erectus, which became extinct only 190,000 years before the mammoths did. The Guardian's environment correspondent expends the last third of his allotted verbiage on the fact that the mammoth's "lost kin" are unlikely to be cloned "à la Dolly the sheep", or perhaps à la Dickie the ham in Stevie's famous velociturkey. One problem, apparently, is that this particular baby mammoth "took [the] secret" of the number of the species' chromosomes "to her freezing grave". The attempt by the Guardian's environment correspondent to inject a bit of Gothic atmosphere into the proceedings is certainly to be commended, as is his focus on the probable practical impossibility of achieving a theoretically possible futility, rather than on anything so tedious as the story of the discovery or even (may the gods of infotainment forfend) its significance to science.