Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Center

So yesterday I, along with a coalition of the willing (Paige, Daniel, and Emma), visited the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center in Woodland Park. While we've been there several times, we have never taken a guided tour before. We did so this time, and it was fascinating to learn more about what people there actually do.

I knew they dug up dinosaur bones and fossils. I didn't know that they rarely do so in Colorado, as they get billed "an arm and a leg and a couple of kids". They usually go to Kansas, although sometimes they go up to Wyoming and Montana. Kansas, for the last 70 million years of the Cretaceous Period, was covered by the Western Interior Seaway, which was at one time about 2,500 feet deep and stretched from the Rockies to the Appalachians. As a result, they often find sea beasties while digging in Kansas.

One such creature, an 18.5 foot long Xiphactinus, was discovered by the owner of the center, Mike Thiebold. They recovered the fossilizied bones and painstakingly reconstructed a skeleton of the big, bony fish over the course of three years. Apparently these fish would eat just about anything they saw, of any size, even if it was big enough to get stuck in their mouths (and some died this way, as the fossil evidence indicates).

The Xiphactinus bones were discovered by Mike Thiebold

The fossilized bones of Xiphactinus that were found in Kansas

A skeletal reconstruction of Xiphactinus

The reconstructed skeleton is shown above (bottom photo). 'An unlovely creature, but it's quite fascinating to think those bones (middle photo) belonged to a fish that was swimming around Lane County, Kansas, perhaps 70 million years ago.

Our guide also told us that efforts are underway to clone a mammoth and that a Neanderthal-human hybrid (half Neanderthal) has been created and is now about seven years old and living in the US. I'm not sure that the latter is accurate, and I can't find information about it online. If true, this raises some ethical questions about how the poor kid could integrate into mostly human (many of us have a small percentage of Neanderthal in our ancestry) society.

I found some information about cloning mammoths, but I'm not sure how accurate any of this is, and I'm abysmally ignorant of the subject:

1) Soaam Biotech Is Bringing Back the Mammoth This article, from Business Insider, talks about the South Korean biotech company, Soaam Biotech, and its cloning efforts. It recently cloned eight coyote pups, which were gestated in a domestic dog. The company believes it can help to preserve endangered canine species (like American red wolves) through cloning. Apparently Soaam has paid the Russian mafia to find an intact mammoth genome that could be inserted into elephant eggs to form a mammoth embryo.

2) Want to Bring Back the Mammoth? Not So Fast This article, from the American Museum of Natural History, suggests that a "mammoth" that gestates in an Asian elephant (a close relative) would not be a mammoth but a mammoth-elephant hybrid, or a mammophant. The article also asks whether it is worth producing a series of "maimed, deformed, stillborn, quasi-mammoths, quasi-elephants" to produce a "sort-of mammoth".

I know very little about this, so I've just downloaded How to Clone a Mammoth by Beth Shapiro, which discusses methods of de-extinction. I hope I have enough background information to be able to understand a little of it.