Wiðercora wrote:

An entire flower from the Ice Age has been resurrected by Russian scientists in a pioneering experiment that could pave the way for the revival of other species including the mammoth.

Firstly, why would you even want to resurrect the mammoth? Secondly, which species of mammoth? Thirdly, why is the media so bloody obsessed with resurrecting mammoths!?

Animavore wrote:

HughMcB wrote:Let's just bring back neanderthals and see if they really do have sex with homo sapiens. We could create a whole new porn category. Inter-species.

Don't we already have that?

xtraordinaryevidence wrote:

Animavore wrote:

HughMcB wrote:Let's just bring back neanderthals and see if they really do have sex with homo sapiens. We could create a whole new porn category. Inter-species.

Don't we already have that?

Yes, we've got quite enough inter-species porn as it is.

Horwood Beer-Master wrote:

mattwilson wrote:I have concerns about reviving plants that haven't lived in such a long time, even more so with animals. These are organisms which haven't coexisted with anything in our ecosystem and we don't know what ramifications it could have should they be allowed to re-inhabit the wild, as a case in point I give you Cane toads in Australia...

Three things spring to my mind here. Firstly, frozen seeds, some of which are bound to be naturally viable, presumably melt out of glaciers and ice sheets all the time. It's a natural process, and no doubt there are plant populations living in particular areas today that owe there existence there to a spell in nature's freezer.
Secondly, did these plants live "such a long time" ago? It's only 30,000 years or so we're talking about. Think of it this way, certain individual trees (such as Yews) can quite easily live up to 5,000 years at the very least, so these flowers may in principle have lived alongside trees only 5 generations distant from trees alive today. So is this really an article about the amazing longevity of seeds? - Or about how amazingly recent the Pleistocene is?
And thirdly, the BBC version of this articles indicates that this species still exists in Siberia anyway. The cloned plants are only slightly different from their modern cousins, and that may well in part be non-genetic for all we know (a consequence of the method of propagation for instance).

So I wouldn't fret about the risk of rampaging campions unbalancing the ecosystem. I would however love one of these in my garden.

rainbow wrote:

xtraordinaryevidence wrote:Yes, we've got quite enough inter-species porn as it is.

You're from New Zealand, I see.

xtraordinaryevidence wrote:

rainbow wrote:

xtraordinaryevidence wrote:Yes, we've got quite enough inter-species porn as it is.

You're from New Zealand, I see.

It's not porn if you don't film it.