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Oh come on!

Cant we have a Great auk, or several?

Think of the fun we could have, letting them savage naysayers, eating all the goldfish and claiming free Icelandair tickets...
 
Even by the Sun's standards that's shite. Clearly a bear with a salmon.
 
I only recently learned that the Asian and African elephants belong to separate genera, and that the Asian elephant is closer to the mammoths (again, a separate genus) than to the African.
 
I was suspicious about the poor quality of the footage in an age of digital cameras.

Thought I'd post it anyway.
 
Although it is a bear with a fish, isn't it lovely to see a wild bear?

Also, that micro pig story made me lol.
 
As for the micro-pig, sell it to the butcher for £500.

Never buy a micro-pig of a dodgy micro-pig salesman.
 
I don't see that as being a bear myself, I think it looks more like a straight manufactured from scratch hoax to me.

I think it's lovely though.
 
He would have taken more mammoth footage but he got distracted by a small sabre-tooth squirrel's humourous attempts to retain an acorn.
 
The opening frame says it all :- copyright Michael Cohen. Now that AllNewsWeb's reputation has permeated every corner of the net he seems to be rebranding himself as a mysteries video journalist.
It probably isn't even a bear with a fish.
 
oldrover said:
I don't see that as being a bear myself, I think it looks more like a straight manufactured from scratch hoax to me.

That's what I'm thinking. It's wading pretty sharp through a fast flowing river and there doesn't seem to be much of a churn around it.

Although have we considered that The Snu may be slowly revealing that someone's built a time machine, gone back with a video camera and filmed the footage? Not a very good video camera mind.
 
Although have we considered that The Snu may be slowly revealing that someone's built a time machine, gone back with a video camera and filmed the footage? Not a very good video camera mind.

Perhaps they invented it back in the 80's hence the wonky footage.

In all seriousness though this isn't a bear any more than it's a mammoth.
 
I think it is a mammoth. I think someone's isolated a few seconds of a distant mammoth against a nice key-able blue sky and lifted it from yon prehistoric film from a few years back. That's why it's in a river and not a forest, it's feet were climbing at an angle.

Can't recall its name but Emmerich was involved.

It had mammoths.
 
You may be right Mooks, it just emphasises how bad fake it is if everyone thinks it's a bear.....
 
Yep, the simple explanation is never enough for some people. :roll:
 
Moooksta said:
I think it is a mammoth. I think someone's isolated a few seconds of a distant mammoth against a nice key-able blue sky and lifted it from yon prehistoric film from a few years back. That's why it's in a river and not a forest, it's feet were climbing at an angle.

Can't recall its name but Emmerich was involved.

It had mammoths.

10,000 B.C.?
 
gncxx said:
Moooksta said:
I think it is a mammoth. I think someone's isolated a few seconds of a distant mammoth against a nice key-able blue sky and lifted it from yon prehistoric film from a few years back. That's why it's in a river and not a forest, it's feet were climbing at an angle.

Can't recall its name but Emmerich was involved.

It had mammoths.

10,000 B.C.?

*touches nose and points at gncxx!
 
My lad watched it and said, "oh, it's a bear with a fish" within the first couple of seconds.

We're both terribly disappointed, as it really did look like a mammoth before the vid actually plays.

He'd concocted a whole theory about scientists cloning a mammoth and smuggling it to Siberia to protect it from press intrusion as well!
 
Looks a strange shape for a bear to me. If it is a mammoth why hasn't it lifted it's trunk out of the water?

I think it's a fake, I desperately wanted it to be a mammoth but IMO its patently not :(
 
There's one point in the video where the supposed trunk is just too thin to be a trunk.

So I'm going for the bear/fish theory.

I've looked at pics of bears and the back does lope down to rear like in the vid.
 
Woolly mammoth in Siberia video was doctored using my footage, says filmmaker

It was either a real live woolly mammoth, a bear with a fish hanging from its jaws, or a simple hoax. The latter appears to be the case ...

An Australian filmmaker says a video of a purported “woolly mammoth” – extinct for 4,000 years – crossing a river in Siberia, which has gone viral on YouTube, was doctored from footage he shot last July while out in the Russian wilderness.

The video, published alongside an exclusive article by Britain's The Sun newspaper, shows the blurred, wobbly image of a large beast crossing a shallow, rocky river.

The Sun reported that the “jaw-dropping” footage was taken by a government engineer last summer in Siberia's Chukotka Autonomous Okrug region, while he was surveying a road project.

However filmmaker Lou Petho told GlobalPost today that he, in fact, shot the footage – which is of the Kitoy River in Siberia's Sayan Mountains – while making a documentary about his grandfather's escape from a Siberian prison camp in 1915.

“I instantly saw it as my footage ... what nailed it was the stone arrangements in the foreground; they lined up perfectly,” says Petho, who is based in Thailand.

The woolly mammoth video has created quite a stir, attracting almost 3 million hits in a matter of days, with dozens of media sites further reproducing the story.

For its article, The Sun spoke to paranormal writer Michael Cohen, who has claimed the copyright to the film, along with production company Barcroft Media.

The paper says the animal's hair in the video “matches samples recovered from mammoth remains regularly dug up from the permafrost in frozen Russia,” while Cohen reminds us that mammoths are being sighted “still kicking around” in Siberia.

"Siberia is an enormous territory and much of it remains completely unexplored and untouched by humans," Cohen told The Sun, which did not dismiss the possibility the video was, in fact, a hoax.

FULL STORY
 
Not much doubt about it but it's unbeleivable from the comments below that some folk are not conviced.
 
Sharing the Blame for the Mammoth's Extinction
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2 ... tml?ref=hp
by Richard A. Kerr on 5 March 2012, 3:01 PM | 7 Comments

Goners. The wooly mammoths may have succumbed to a combination of rapid climate change and human depredation, possibly by overhunting.
Credit: Creative Commons/Wikimedia

The past few tens of millennia were hard times for the "megafauna" of the world. Hundreds of big-bodied species—from the mammoths of North America to the 3-meter-tall kangaroos of Australia to the 200-kilogram-plus flightless birds of New Zealand—just disappeared from the fossil record. A new, broad analysis continues the century-long debate over the loss of the big animals, coming down on the middle ground between blaming migrating humans for wiping them all out and climate change alone for doing them in.

As in most contentious scientific debates, uncertainties in the data have fueled the dispute over what took out the megafauna. Typically, researchers would try to pin down exactly when, say, the mammoths of North America died out, when the climate changed the fastest as the world came out of the last ice age, and, most difficult, when humans from Asia first arrived on the scene. If the extinction in a particular area seemed to coincide with severe climate change or with the arrival of humans, one or the other could be blamed. If it seemed to have been the humans, researchers assumed the new arrivals must have hunted down too many mammoths, brought a lethal disease with them, or altered the environment somehow, perhaps by too much burning.

But the case-by-case tactic has not yet carried the day for either side. So zoologists Graham Prescott and David Williams and their colleagues at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom decided to take a broader approach. In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they lay out their analysis of the extinction of 110 genera of megafauna on five landmasses in relation to the timing of four kinds of climate change and the arrival of humans.

The Cambridge group compiled dates from previous studies for the arrival of humans and the extinction of megafauna on each landmass: Australia, Eurasia, New Zealand, North America, and South America. And they took the temperature record locked in an Antarctic ice core as a guide to global climate change. Then they compared how well climate change and human arrivals, alone or in combination, could predict the timing and severity of extinctions on the five landmasses. To sort out the importance of timing uncertainties, they tested 320,000 different extinction scenarios. "We tested a lot of models across a huge range of human arrival times and extinction times," Prescott says. "It seems likely that both climate and human factors played a role" in most cases.

"What they found makes sense," says mammalian paleoecologist Anthony Barnosky of the University of California, Berkeley. "It makes a clear case for there being an interaction. It shows what happens when two bad things happen at once." Barnosky and environmental scientist Barry Brook of the University of Adelaide in Australia have found such a human-climate synergy operating in megafaunal extinctions when severe climate change coincided with human arrivals. A similar synergy is happening today, they say, as global warming intensifies and the human population continues to grow.

But others have concerns about the latest study—for example, the way it lumps together events occurring as much as 10,000 years apart to test for coincidence. "When you have such a challenging problem, what are you willing to ignore in the details to get the big picture?" asks ecological statistician Andrew Solow of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. "I'm worried that too much of the detail was omitted. This is a first step."
 
S.Korean, Russian scientists bid to clone mammoth
http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-sko ... mmoth.html
March 13th, 2012 in Biology / Biotechnology

File picture shows giant bronze sculptures of mammoths in the Siberian city of Khanty-Mansiysk. Russian and South Korean scientists have signed a deal on joint research intended to recreate a woolly mammoth, an animal which last walked the earth some 10,000 years ago.

Russian and South Korean scientists have signed a deal on joint research intended to recreate a woolly mammoth, an animal which last walked the earth some 10,000 years ago.

The deal was signed by Vasily Vasiliev, vice rector of North-Eastern Federal University of the Sakha Republic, and controversial cloning pioneer Hwang Woo-Suk of South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, on Tuesday.

Hwang was a national hero until some of his research into creating human stem cells was found in 2006 to have been faked. But his work in creating Snuppy, the world's first cloned dog, in 2005, has been verified by experts.
Stem cell scientists are now setting their sights on the extinct woolly mammoth, after global warming thawed Siberia's permafrost and uncovered remains of the animal.

South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk (L) and Vasily Vasiliev (R), vice director of North-Eastern Federal University of Russia's Sakha Republic, exchange agreements during a signing ceremony on joint research at Hwang's office in Seoul. The research collaboration agreement will help Russian and S.Korean scientists to recreate a woolly mammoth which last walked the earth some 10,000 years ago.

Sooam said it would launch research this year if the Russian university can ship the remains. The Beijing Genomics Institute will also take part in the project.

The South Korean foundation said it would transfer technology to the Russian university, which has already been involved in joint research with Japanese scientists to bring a mammoth back to life.

"The first and hardest mission is to restore mammoth cells," another Sooam researcher, Hwang In-Sung, told AFP. His colleagues would join Russian scientists in trying to find well-preserved tissue with an undamaged gene.
By replacing the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant with those taken from the mammoth's somatic cells, embryos with mammoth DNA could be produced and planted into elephant wombs for delivery, he said.

Sooam will use an Indian elephant for its somatic cell nucleus transfer. The somatic cells are body cells, such as those of internal organs, skin, bones and blood.

"This will be a really tough job, but we believe it is possible because our institute is good at cloning animals," Hwang In-Sung said.

South Korean experts have previously cloned animals including a cow, a cat, dogs, a pig and a wolf.

Last October Hwang Woo-Suk unveiled eight cloned coyotes in a project sponsored by a provincial government.
 
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