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Today the thorniest questions about clon­ing extinct species may be less technical than ethical. “Mammoths, like elephants, were intel­ligent, highly social animals,” says Adrian Lister, paleontologist and mammoth expert at the Natural History Museum in London. “Cloning would give you a single animal, which would live all alone in a park, a zoo, or a lab—not in its native habitat, which no longer exists. You’re basically creating a curio.” Tom Gilbert, an expert in ancient DNA at Copenhagen University who with Schuster and Webb pioneered the harvesting of mammoth DNA from hair, admits that as a student of mammoths, he’d be the first to go see one trundle across a paddock. But he questions both the utility and the wisdom of cloning extinct species. “If you can do a mammoth, you can do anything else that’s dead, including your grandmother. But in a world in global warming and with limited resources for research, do you really want to bring back your dead grandmother?”