This little tidbit is actually a couple of months old, and I was going to let it fall by the wayside, but upon reading it again it just seems so, well, Asylum-esque that I can't pass it up. The long and the short of it (the short and the long of it here) is that an international coalition of scientists from Japan, Russia and the United States are convinced they will be able to genetically reproduce - a.k.a. clone - a baby mammoth using DNA the Russians somehow have on ice (uh-huh...) to fertilize and African Elephant embryo.
Man oh man; the possibilities for catastrophe here are almost endless.
First off - it's a fucking mammoth. Granted, size and weight-wise, it's pretty comparable to an modern-day African Elephant - nothing to spit at - but the tusks alone move it to the top of the land-based apex predators list: longer than an elephants, nearly six-and-a-half feet, and almost pincer-like in the way they can rip through prey.
Second off - think about when it was last on the planet. During the Pleistocene Epoch, such formidable predators as saber-toothed tigers, mastodons, wooly rhinoceroses, glyptodons and cave bears roamed the terrain. It was a far more primal planet then than now, when a mammoth's biggest threat would undoubtedly be us. This thing would decimate anything it came across. No lab could contain it, no zoo could tame it. This is an old-school predator, the likes of which our fiercest species have never seen. It would rule the animal kingdom. Especially if, say, there were more than one of them.
Because - in my admittedly over-simplistic understanding of science - cloning's just like making Xeroxes, and sometimes those machines stick, and it just keeps copying and copying and copying...next thing you know, we've got a herd of prehistoric furry elephants with 6'5'' razor sharp tusks running amok in downtown Los Angeles. Just imagine the cinematic possibilities*; it'd be like 10,000 B.C. (or 100 Million B.C.) meets Battle: Los Angeles (or Battle of Los Angeles). Either way William Katt's my vote for the role of big game hunter brought in to help thin the population. Or Gary Stretch. Or, shit, even Lorenzo. Throw in Jaleel White as the paleontologist at his side, and the lovely lady mentioned in the asterisk as, well, who cares, and you've got yourself a movie.
Just sayin'.
*yes, I am fully aware of the SyFy original movie Mammoth with Tom Skerritt and the exquisite Summer Glau, but that was only one mammoth, already intact, resurrected by aliens and terrorizing a small town in middle America. Not at all the massive-mammoth-herd-devastating-a-major-metropolitan-area epic I'm imagining. And no aliens. Our scientists are perfectly capable of destroying the planet ourselves, than you very much.
Man oh man; the possibilities for catastrophe here are almost endless.
First off - it's a fucking mammoth. Granted, size and weight-wise, it's pretty comparable to an modern-day African Elephant - nothing to spit at - but the tusks alone move it to the top of the land-based apex predators list: longer than an elephants, nearly six-and-a-half feet, and almost pincer-like in the way they can rip through prey.
Second off - think about when it was last on the planet. During the Pleistocene Epoch, such formidable predators as saber-toothed tigers, mastodons, wooly rhinoceroses, glyptodons and cave bears roamed the terrain. It was a far more primal planet then than now, when a mammoth's biggest threat would undoubtedly be us. This thing would decimate anything it came across. No lab could contain it, no zoo could tame it. This is an old-school predator, the likes of which our fiercest species have never seen. It would rule the animal kingdom. Especially if, say, there were more than one of them.
Because - in my admittedly over-simplistic understanding of science - cloning's just like making Xeroxes, and sometimes those machines stick, and it just keeps copying and copying and copying...next thing you know, we've got a herd of prehistoric furry elephants with 6'5'' razor sharp tusks running amok in downtown Los Angeles. Just imagine the cinematic possibilities*; it'd be like 10,000 B.C. (or 100 Million B.C.) meets Battle: Los Angeles (or Battle of Los Angeles). Either way William Katt's my vote for the role of big game hunter brought in to help thin the population. Or Gary Stretch. Or, shit, even Lorenzo. Throw in Jaleel White as the paleontologist at his side, and the lovely lady mentioned in the asterisk as, well, who cares, and you've got yourself a movie.
Just sayin'.
*yes, I am fully aware of the SyFy original movie Mammoth with Tom Skerritt and the exquisite Summer Glau, but that was only one mammoth, already intact, resurrected by aliens and terrorizing a small town in middle America. Not at all the massive-mammoth-herd-devastating-a-major-metropolitan-area epic I'm imagining. And no aliens. Our scientists are perfectly capable of destroying the planet ourselves, than you very much.
It's hardly a predator- the corpses recovered from the ice have buttercups in their mouths and tummies.
ReplyDeleteHow millions of "prehistoric" animals all died at the same time in some sort of gigantic flash flood is another question entirely of course.
How soon they forget... Tom Skerritt and Summer Glau did Mammoth in 2006 for Plinyminor, which went to SyFy. What we need now is Mega Mammoth vs Giant Ground Sloth!
ReplyDelete"cloning's just like making Xeroxes, and sometimes those machines stick"
MAMMOTH JAM. CLEAR JAM AND PRESS RESET. JOB WILL RESUME AT PREVIOUS MAMMOTH.
"the corpses recovered from the ice have buttercups in their mouths and tummies"
Psh, yeah. Because they were in the tummies of eohippuses that the deadly mammoths sneaked up on and devoured with their savage jaws!