What’s the story with . . . the woolly mammoth?

Nothing is more certain than that our comfortable certainties about the past are not set in stone. A baby mammoth discovered perfectly preserved in the permafrost of north-west Siberia has raised the prospect of the creatures, which disappeared 12,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, being reintroduced by cloning DNA from the female calf.

The six-month-old specimen of mammuthus primigenius was discovered by a reindeer herder, Yuri Khudi, in May on the Yamal peninsula and has been named Lyuba after his wife. Lyuba is the biggest thing in palaeontology for years and caused a buzz at last month's international mammoth conference in Yakutsk in north-east Russia, an area so rich in mammoth finds that it boasts a permafrost museum.

The new find, described by Alexei Tikhonov of the Zoological Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, "as the world's most valuable discovery", because of its state of preservation, has prompted speculation that its hair could provide DNA. That in turn could lead to a mammoth being cloned by fusing the nucleus of a mammoth cell with a modern elephant egg cell stripped of its own DNA.

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