Siberian super lab that plans to bring back the woolly mammoth

RUSSIA is hoping to bring the woolly mammoth back to life after building a giant cloning lab deep in Siberia.

The £ .5million facility also aims to recreate other long-extinct mammals such as a woolly rhinoceros and a cave lion.

Plans for the Jurassic Park- style ‘world class paleo-genetic scientific centre’ in the world’s coldest city, Yakutsk, will be unveiled next month when Vladimir Putin hosts an investment forum there.

The cloning laboratories – some sunk deep in the permafrost soil – aim to continue research by Russian and South Korean scientists who want to restore long-extinct species.

The animals, including the mammoth, roamed a much colder planet tens of thousands of years ago in what is known as the Pleistocene Era.

Their DNA has been preserved in remains encased in the frozen soil, or permafrost.

Yakutsk is capital of the Sakha Republic in Siberia where 80 per cent of such remains with preserved soft tissue in the world have been found.

The lab, based at Russia’s Northern-Eastern Federal University, aims ‘to restore such creatures as the woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave lion and breeds of long-gone horses’, reported The Siberian Times.

Dr Lena Grigorieva – who drafted plans for the centre – said that nowhere else in the world has similar DNA material from such ancient species.

The university is already working in close co-operation with South Korean researchers.

There are also links between Russian scientists and Harvard University geneticist Professor George Church who plans to put woolly mammoth genes in an Asian elephant embryo by 2020 – hoping to create a mammoth-elephant hybrid.