You will often hear the cliché’ that a photograph freezes a moment in time.  Hmm!  Yesterday I came across a news photo that appears to put this phrase in new light.  On Tuesday what is probably the best preserved mammoth extracted from the Russian tundra went on display in Moscow.  With or without a photograph, here is something truly frozen in time – from 38,000 years ago.

Needless-to-say this mammoth has raised hopes of resurrection of the wooly beast by cloning – shades of Jurassic Park.  I remember quite vividly as a child visiting the skeletons of these prehistoric animals at the American Museum of Natural History and wondering … Is the validity of recalling these victims of extinction simply a matter of wonder, is it science, or is just a collective guilt – probably a little bit of all three. We can debate the ethics and consequences of cloning.

And speaking about ethics… This also raises the important (?) question of whether the Russian Czars actually ate mammoth or the related mastodon meat.  I have it on good authority (The Internet) that these stories are false and apocryphal.  Too bad, I guess.  Most discovered mammoth flesh extracted from the tundra permafrost is kinda putrid and pretty foul smelling.  So for now I’m going to need to be content with a colleague’s father, who discovered thirty year old hamburger at the bottom of a freezer that he had in his barn.  He ate it with great satisfaction.