Real-life Jurassic Park

[dasa 0]

Real-life Jurassic Park Coming Soon

August 12, 2002 9:30 CDT

 

You might call it, "Jurassic Park: Live!" It's not a stage version of the popular movie, though -- this really is "Jurassic Park" -- live!

They plan to call it the "Pleistocene Park". Located in Siberia, the proposed site is in an area far from humans, which has good grazing for the ancient animals that will roam the grounds. Of course, some accommodation will have to be made for the tourists who come to the park in deference to Siberia's fierce winters, but Akira Iritani is confident that they can do that easily.

 

Where, you ask, will they get the ancient animals to populate the park? Just as in the movie, they plan to find some viable DNA for creatures like the mammoths and the woolly rhinoceros, and simply recreate them.

 

They'll artificially inseminate the modern counterpart with the ancient specimen's DNA and get a mixture of old and new characteristics. They'll continue to do that across generations, inseminating the "combination" animal with the ancient DNA until they have a fairly accurate version of what roamed the lands there twenty-thousand years ago.

 

A team of Japanese and Russian scientists is currently working in the area of the park, located in the Siberian province of Yakutsk. They hope to find samples of animals they can resurrect, and their wish list for DNA is impressive.

 

The search area has been narrowed to several hundred square meters of tundra, where the team hopes to recover viable DNA from the Siberian tiger, steppe lions, giant deer, ancient foxes and the ancestors of the Siberian horse, as well as mammoths and woolly rhinos. Is it really possible to do that, you ask?

 

"It probably sounds a little far-fetched, but it's absolutely possible to do this," says Professor Akira Iritani, who is co-coordinating the project from Osaka's Kinki University.

 

Speaking to The Scotsman - International, he shared his excitement for the project. "The best way to clone one of these animals is to find frozen sperm, but that is very difficult. Alternatively, a portion of muscle, skin or any piece of tissue can be a good source of viable DNA. "The most important thing is to find a good carcass," he declared. "We need to find specimens that were frozen immediately after death and have remained at a temperature of between -25C and -30C ever since."

 

The team is currently harvesting specimens from the town of Chokurdakh, near the East Siberian Sea and more than 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle. They are concentrating on a site identified last year by local people as having numerous cadavers buried in the permafrost. The search area has been narrowed to several hundred square meters of tundra.

 

Mr. Iritani has been working in collaboration with a university in Bangkok and as soon as usable mammoth DNA has been identified, an elephant will be artificially inseminated with the nucleus. Each generation of crossbred mammoths will more closely resemble the genetic inheritance of its forefathers as females are impregnated with more DNA from the male mammoth.

 

The same process will be used with the other beasts and, in as little as 20 years, Mr. Iritani says, these long-extinct creatures will once again be roaming the steppe.

 

"It all depends on getting the good quality tissue, of course, but we will eventually be able to produce many, many animals. At present the success rate for cloned animals is not so high, but in a few years we will have the technology to repair recovered DNA that has been slightly damaged. We'll store any damaged DNA that we find and we're not going to give up this project."

 

The ultimate aim is the Siberian sanctuary. "The last time I was over there our Russian counterparts showed us to the place they will provide for us to build Pleistocene Park," Mr. Iritani said. "We flew over it in a helicopter and the quality of the grass there seems to be perfect for animals we're working on."

 

The finished park will cover an area roughly twice the size of Britain. The location has no human habitation. As well as facilities for tourists, the park will need to provide shelter for the animals, as Mr. Iritani believes Siberia's elements were far less severe 20,000 years ago. His search for a frozen mammoth began in 1996 and he is now a leading member of the Mammoth Creation Society, a group based in Japan.

 

The group has organized several expeditions in search of carcasses and in the summer of 1999 recovered a section of skin from what they believed was a mammoth. Their hopes were soon dashed when it was determined that 90 per cent of the skins DNA sequence matched that of the Indian rhinoceros, although Kazufumi Goto, a professor of reproductive physiology at Kagoshima University and a member of the group, said the discovery was still valuable.

 

Mr. Iritani says a key part of his quest is to draw attention to melting of the permafrost because of global warming.