 Computer-Generated Woolly Mammoth
|
July 17, 2003 — The central Japanese city hosting the Expo 2005 world exposition plans to excavate an entire frozen mammoth and display it at the fair under a multi-million dollar Siberian expedition project, organizers said Thursday.
Seto and the other cities in Aichi prefecture, 250 kilometers (155 miles) west of Tokyo, have set up the Mammoth Excavation and Exhibition Organization Committee to send a mission to explore the Siberian permafrost.
"I believe chances of success will be 80-90 percent, given technological advances and information accumulated over the years," said Shinji Furukawa, chairman of the new committee.
|
 
|
|||||||
If realized, the display would greatly impress visitors, he said.
The first stage of the mission, set for August-September of this year, will be information-gathering on the whereabouts of frozen mammoth remains and surveys of areas around Khatanga and Yakutsk in northern and eastern Siberia, respectively.
The Magadan area bordering the Pacific Ocean and other locations may be added as candidates for surveys.
A test excavation may begin in September before the onset of the Siberian winter if the information obtained in the initial surveys is reliable.
The second stage will be excavation, scheduled for May-September 2004, while October 2004 to May 2005 is earmarked for transporting the excavated specimen to the expo venue.
Furukawa said the first stage alone would cost about 100 million yen ($847,000), and several hundreds of millions of yen more would be needed for excavation, transport and exhibition.
Takeshi Matsuda, a committee member who is to join survey and excavation work, noted several full-body mammoths had been found in the past.
"But none of them has been excavated and preserved in a perfect condition ... as frozen bodies start to rot the moment they come out of ice," he said.
"It is not a matter of whether there are full bodies but a question of excavation timing and methods," he added.
Furukawa said the committee was ready to cooperate with scientists hoping to resurrect the long-extinct woolly tuskers by using DNA taken from frozen samples.
The world fair, which takes place every five years, is to open in Seto in March 2005.
As a boon to a group of Russian and Japanese scientists who are hoping to clone mammoths, specimens from legs of what they believe are the extinct animal arrived at Kinki University's Gifu Science and Technology Center in western Japan on Thursday.
"The bone marrow, skin and muscle specimens, frozen in nitrogen liquid, ... look fine," the center's president, Akira Iritani, said after receiving the samples from Russia.
"We first have to confirm whether these are really of a mammoth," he said.
"We then have to check the extent of damage to DNA as they are believed to be 200,000-300,000 years old, and find whether they are still good enough for cloning," which would use elephant eggs, he said.
"We may not be able to make the leap to a cloning process but will be at least one step closer to the dream," he said.
Iritani has been working with the Vektor Research Centre for Virusology and Biotechnology of Russia.
Their team found what they believe are the legs of a mammoth in August last year in Russia's far-northern Yakutia region.
While admitting he and other colleagues "envy" the Aichi exposition project, Iritani said he hoped the exposition committee would live up to its promise to cooperate with the cloning scientists if it makes a significant find.
< news main
