We’re Trying To Bring Woolly Mammoths Back Because It’s 2017, Baby

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As you enter or exit Denver International Airport, you will see a massive blue horse statue reared up on its hind legs. At night, its eyes glow red. Because of its creepy appearance and possibly because of its intricately detailed gooch, the statue is known as Blucifer. I’ve always loved Blucifer for one specific reason: it killed its own God. On the cusp of being completed, the head of the statue fell on its creator, Luis Jiménez, severing an artery and killing him.

Setting aside the fact that even though it’s not expressly forbidden, it’s pretty clear it’s something you’re super not supposed to do. Think about how metal that is. We’re not talking regicide here, or even patricide (which in Roman times held a much worse penalty). We’re talking about full-on balls-out deicide. That kind of thing has always fascinated me. Not a minor sin here or there, but what could possibly be such an affront to God that he would consider you a rival and therefore a threat.

Thanks to some Harvard nerds with an obvious furry fetish, we have our answer.

Speaking before the American Association for the Advancement of Science this year, a team of Harvard scientists are announcing that they are two years away from splicing together parts of the Woolly Mammoth genome with Asian Elephant embryos. In case you were about to say it, this is the same basic premise of the science behind Jurassic Park.

Most of us equate Woolly Mammoths with the Ice Age and possibly Legolas. Both of these conceptions are a little off base though. While the majority of Woolly Mammoths died out when the glaciers receded, there was actually a secret Woolly Mammoth island in the Chukchi Sea where a population of around 1,000 survived until about 1650 BC.

I’ll pause to let you digest the phrase “secret Woolly Mammoth island.”

Anyway, a shitload of stuff was already going on by 1650 BC. Forget agriculture, dildos, prostitution, the written word, and the written word on dildos, humans were already well into the trappings of actual civilization. The great pyramids of Giza were 1,000 years old at this time, and Moses’s Exodus (you know, THAT Exodus) happened about a hundred years later. The Mayans were already doing their own thing in Central America for quite some time by this point as well. Which is all to say, these things aren’t THAT old.

So what is the plan of these scientists? They’re going to grow some hybrid mammoth elephant – they actually wrote the word “mammophant” – ex vivo. Then they’re going to try and reintroduce it into a herd of Asian elephants. Here’s where things get hilarious or sad, depending on your sense of humor. Asian elephants are very social, which means they’re either going to accept this new creature as one of their own and teach all of us humans a lesson on love, OR they’re going to beat it to death because they want to make pachyderms great again and how did this asshole get on this side of that fucking wall?!

In this author’s opinion, I think it’s going to be somewhere in the middle. I personally believe elephants are more similar to street gangs than we realize, and that they’re going to jump in this new hairy banger..

Image via Shutterstock

[via The Guardian]

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Icehouse

International sailing champion and friend to most wolves. Except Larry, he knows what he did.

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