[UnderseaLcpl]

Does this sound to anyone else as though it wouldn't work without making serious genetic modifications to the mammoth? Wouldn't the mother's.... I mean parent 1's or 2's, or whatever's body reject the embryo? Well, not reject the embryo per se but end up toxifying or starving it? And that's assuming they even get it to a placental stage.

There's a reason why you can't make a chimp give birth to a human or killer whale to a bottlenose dolphin or what have you, and I don't mean some divine reason or the fact that it would be very....unnatural. Elephants and mammoths are pretty close from a genetic perspective, but they aren't that close. There's quite a bit of difficulty involved with implanting an embryo amongst members of the exact same species, and that's without having the zygote's chromosomal structure replaced by that of a species which has not been co-evolving for like, 10,000 years.

I must admit, I've never cloned an animal myself so I have to assume that these guys have some kind of workaround, but even so I can't help but get the feeling that somebody didn't think this through. Time will tell, but if their intent is to simply stick mammoth genes in an elephant cell, as the article puts it, I'm pretty dang sure this won't work.