Story:
Scientists Successfully Cloned Woolly Mammoth Picture
Fact Check:
An interesting story shared on social media purports to show a Cloned Woolly Mammoth Picture beside a Scientist. Although it looks real, the claim that the picture shows actual woolly mammoth scientists successfully cloned is not true.
Cloned Woolly Mammoth Picture is Not Real
Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) have been extinct for thousands of years. In spite of that scientists say it may be possible to ‘resurrect’ them and other species from the grave, through a process called De-extinction. In 2015, Harvard geneticist George M. Church (seen in picture) and his colleagues inserted DNA from the frozen remains of a woolly mammoth into cells taken from a live Asian elephant, which is closest extant species. The cloning trials are going on, and the scientist George M. Church himself said we won’t be seeing woolly mammoths prancing around anytime soon, “because there is more work to do”.
Coming to the Cloned Woolly Mammoth picture in question, it is credited to ‘Renegade Pictures’ as mentioned in a related article on Live Science website livescience.com. Renegade Pictures is a film making company that makes documentary series among other shows. The picture comes from the Channel 4 documentary called ‘Woolly Mammoth – The Autopsy‘ that was screened in November 2014. The documentary was in fact Renegade Pictures and Smithsonian Channel co-production for Channel 4. The show discussed the autopsy of remains of a mammoth unearthed by scientists in May 2013 in Northern Siberia. It also mentioned the de-extinction programmes in the United States and South Korea.
To conclude, the claim that the picture shows a real woolly mammoth that scientists have successfully cloned is a hoax.
Hoax or Fact:
Hoax.
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