A Japanese organization's dream of resurrecting the mammoth from extinction using cloning techniques and animal skin discovered in Siberia was dashed Friday when they declared that the skin is probably not from a mammoth at all, but from an animal resembling a rhinoceros.
The skin was unearthed in August last year from frozen ground in Russia's Sakha Republic in Siberia by the Mammoth Creation Association, a group based in Miyazaki Prefecture.
Association member Akira Iritani, a professor at Kinki University's School of Biology-Oriented Science and Technology, and other researchers examined the skin and concluded that it more likely came from a woolly rhinoceros, an animal which lived alongside the mammoth in Siberia in the last ice age.
More than 90 percent of the skin's DNA sequence matched that of the Indian rhinoceros and other members of the rhinoceros family, compared to the 70 percent that matched the DNA of the African and Asian elephants, which are genetically similar to the mammoth, the researchers said. Kazufumi Goto, formerly a professor at Kagoshima University's Faculty of Agriculture and another association member, said the finding is regrettable but added that the skin of a woolly rhinoceros also constitutes a valuable discovery.
He said the group will focus on finding frozen sperm from ancient animals from now on.