Newsweek reports on a Japanese animal physiologist's plan to bring a
woolly mammoth back into existence.  "Kazufumi Goto wants to take
mammoth sperm cells frozen in the Siberian tundra, use them to
fertilize the egg of an Indian elephant and repeat for generations.
The final scene: a mostly mammoth pachyderm.  To get started, Goto last
month led a team of researchers to Siberia, where they planned an
excavation of frozen mammoths for next July.  The good news: in the
last 300 years, many mammoth carcasses have been found -- some in
remarkably good shape.  And in 1990 Goto used dead cow sperm to
fertilize a live egg, and got a perfectly normal calf. The downside:
hybrid creatures, like mules, are usually infertile. And repeatedly
using sperm from the same mammoth could produce the same effect as any
other inbreeding: really strange offspring."

16 responses total.

Such are the miracles that science is making possible.

Especially cows that produce sperm.

   bringing back extinct critters doesn't me as a *good thing,* but my
objections are more philosophical than scientific.

  Re 2, maybe you should contact Newsweek for a technical editing
position :-).  I kind of thought of "cow" as an informal species name
as well as a gender-specific term, but checking in a dictionary, 
there is certainly no such ambiguity.

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Cattle

This response has been erased.

  Webster says a cow is "the mature female of domestic cattle," and
says cattle are "domesticated bovine animals collectively; cows,
bulls, steers, and oxen," but that it doesn't usually refer to calves
or heifers, which are younger.  So "cattle" isn't quite right for a
general species name, either.  It looks kind of like there might not
be a common species name for that type of animal.  Weird!

Bos

   bovine, perhaps? "there goes a bovine. it's too far away to tell if it's
a cow or a bull."

The Bovidae is the family, which includes cattle, sheep, bison, etc. The
genus of cattle is Bos (sorry I didn't explain #9). That's why cows are
sometimes called "Bossy". 

  Interesting.  Not what I'd call a "common" (general usage) term, and
it's still broader than what I think of as the "cow" species (Bos includes
buffalo, bison, and oxen), but it seems as close a name as there is.  If
feminist cows ever insist on politically correct gender-neutrality, I
suppose we'll have to speak of milking Bos instead of milking cows.

If I milk anything, it will be a cow!

No, bison are Bison bison. The ox is Bos taurus. Buffalo cover several
different genera - the Cape Buffalo is Syncerus caffer. I think Bos is the
closest you can get to what you want. 

  Here's what Webster's Unabridged says for Bos: "In zoology,
a genus of quadrupeds characterized by horns hollow within and
turned outward in the form of crescents, eight fore-teeth in the
under jaw but none in the upper, and no dogteeth.  It includes
the common ox, the bison, the buffalo, and other species."

Get a taxonomy book. 

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