Say scientists succeed in bringing a mammoth back, where would it live?
You need a place to put them that would be similar to the habitat that existed 10,000 years ago. There are certain areas that seem to be close to what it was like 10,000 years ago in Northern Siberia. And there’s even an attempt to try to re-create a Pleistocene ecosystem in Northern Siberia, called Pleistocene Park. It’s very wet and boggy in Northern Siberia today. It can’t sustain huge populations of grazing animals. It could not sustain mammoths today. Mammoths, presumably, if they were like elephants, need to eat 300 pounds of forage a day. So, you couldn’t just stick a mammoth in Northern Siberia and expect it to survive. In the last Ice Age, you had dry grasslands, very rich land that could support lots of grazing animals, lots of mammoths, lots of woolly rhinos, lots of steppe bison. One theory is that these large animals helped to maintain that ecosystem. Russian ecologist Sergei Zimov is working to bring bison to Siberia to a fenced-off section of land called Pleistocene Park
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