It’s “Jurassic Park” in real life.  Did we learn nothing from Hollywood?  Scientists now think it might be possible to actually clone a woolly mammoth within the next five years after finding well-preserved bone marrow in a thigh bone recovered from permafrost soil found in Siberia.

Teams from Russia’s Sakha Republic’s mammoth museum and Japan’s Kinki University will launch a joint research project in 2012 with the goal of recreating the giant land mammal.

Scientists hope to replace the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant with those taken from the mammoth’s marrow cells, thereby creating embryos with woolly mammoth DNA.

The researchers then plan on planting the embryos inside an elephant womb for delivery, as the two species are closely related.

The key component to making this whole thing work is finding nuclei with an undamaged gene.  For scientists involved in this kind of research since the late 1990′s (about the same time as when the “Jurassic Park” films were raking in the box office coinage), finding nuclei with undamaged mammoth genes has been am uphill battle.

Mammoths became extinct some 10,000 years ago, but the discovery in August in Siberia has scientists optimistic about a successful cloning.

It seems that global warming has recently thawed ground in eastern Russia that’s usually nearly permanently frozen, leading to the discoveries of a myriad of frozen woolly mammoths.

Sounds like a great idea.  It will be the only one of its kind on the planet…not like it will get lonely or anything.

After all, what could possibly go wrong?