Mammoth: The Resurrection Of An Ice Age Giant - Softcover

Stone, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0738207756 ISBN 13: 9780738207759

Publisher: Perseus Publishing, 2002

Synopsis

In this adventure-filled narrative, science writer Richard Stone follows two groups of explorers--one a Russian-Japanese team, the other a French-led consortium--as they battle bitter cold, high winds, and supply shortages to carry out their quest. Armed with GPS, ground-penetrating radar, and Soviet-era military helicopters, they seek an elusive prize: a mammoth carcass that will help determine how the creature lived, how it died--and how it might be brought back to life.A riveting tale of high-stakes adventure and scientific hubris, Mammoth is also an intellectual voyage through uncharted moral terrain, as we confront the promise and peril of resurrecting creatures from the deep past.

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Review:

Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park introduced readers to the once improbable notion that, thanks to advances in genetic science, dinosaurs could be brought back from the grave. Richard Stone's Mammoth offers a kindred scenario: the establishment of a "Pleistocene Park," in which long-extinct creatures like the mammoth, saber-toothed tiger, and woolly rhino could be resurrected and given sanctuary.

This is not a science-fiction vision, we learn from science journalist Stone's absorbing journey into recent prehistory. Already, scientists from Russia, Canada, the United States, and other nations are studying the possibility of restoring a stretch of northern Siberia to its Pleistocene condition, thereby creating what they call a "mammoth steppe" populated by bison, Yakutian horses, and elephants--and one day, perhaps, creatures such as the woolly mammoth, genetically "summoned from the world of the dead." The materials are readily available, Stone writes, in the form of DNA-bearing "muscles and ligaments and fat" found in mammoths now buried in arctic permafrost. Whether those remnants can be made to bring back to life what Siberians call the "rat beneath the ice" is another question, but it's one that many scholars are busily exploring.

While looking into what he calls a "watershed in efforts to study lost ecosystems," Stone provides a lively natural history of the mammoth and evaluates conflicting theories on its extinction. His book makes for a memorable journey into unknown scientific territory--and a glimpse at a possible future that is surpassing strange. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author:

Richard Stone is the European News Editor of Science magazine. He has written for Discover, the Washington Post, the Moscow Times, Smithsonian, and numerous other publications. A graduate of Cornell University and a Fulbright scholar in Russia, Stone won the Evert Clark Award for science journalism in 1995 for a Discover article and a Walter Sullivan Award in 2001 for an article in Smithsonian magazine.

About this edition

• Publisher: Perseus Publishing
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0738207756
• ISBN 13: 9780738207759
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 242