If you thought Jurassic Park was pure fiction, you might want to rethink that. A bunch of scientists in Siberia are saying there's a high chance they'll be able to clone a wooly mammoth. Better make two of these, otherwise one will be super lonely.

The team discovered a well preserved mammoth carcass, frozen in Siberia's Malolyakhovskiv island. They estimate that the animal is about 43,000 years old and it was 50-60 years when it died after getting stuck in ice. The team of scientists have been carefully thawing out what they need to make another.

Viktoria Egorova, chief of the Research and Clinical Diagnostic Laboratory of the Medical Clinic of North-Eastern Federal University, says that they have found haemolysed blood containing erythrocytes, along with migrating cells in the lymphoid tissue, all key to making the cloning process work.

Khayrullin says that the resulting animal will not be identical to what used to walk the Earth though. They'll have to use a female elephant as a surrogate mother to birth an abomination from the past.

"We must have a reason to do this, as it is one thing to clone it for scientific purpose, and another to clone for the sake of curiosity."

[Huffington Post, via Siberian Times]