FOXSYLVANIA

– – A not-so giant mammoth excavated from the Siberian permafrost in late September 2,200 miles northeast of Moscow near the Sopochnaya Karga cape was a 16-year-old at the time of his death who stood two meters tall (6’6″) and weighed 500 kilograms (1,100 lbs).  He was named Jenya after the 11-year-old Russian boy who found the animal’s limbs sticking out of the frozen mud.  Jenya was missing a left tusk, a fact which handicapped him for fighting and may have contributed to his early death tens of thousands of years ago.

While Jenya’s carcass is the best preserved one since a 1901 discovery of a giant mammoth, the DNA has been damaged by low temperatures which rendered it unsuitable for possible cloning.  A summer expedition’s discovery of mammoth hair, soft tissues, and bone marrow holds more promise for cloning, however, with much of the genetic code of the wooly mammoth already deciphered from balls of mammoth hair found frozen in the Siberian permafrost…