In five years time, you could be seeing a woolly mammoth roaming the Earth again. Scientists from Japan and Russia have discovered a well-preserved thigh bone from a woolly mammoth buried in the permafrost in Siberia and they believe they can clone a mammoth from the remains.

Teams from Sakha Republic's mammoth museum and Japan's Kinki University plan to take marrow cells from the preserved thigh bone and place them in the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant. The embryos from this procedure will have mammoth DNA which can be implanted in elephant wombs for delivery.

The question is should this method even be considered? Barring the technical difficulties in resurrecting a dead species and the cost of such of a venture, is it even possible? Cloning is still an inexact science. Add to that the difficulty of actually finding viable DNA from the preserved thigh bone that will prove suitable for cloning and the chances for seeing a live mammoth is becoming less likely. Scientists have so far only been able to bring one species back from the grave: the Pyrenean Ibex and that did not end well.

The Pyrenean ibex died out in 2000 which was recent enough so that scientists had enough material to clone the goat species. In 2003 scientists successfully implanted cell nuclei of the ibex into the eggs of goats. Only two eggs survived the initial stages of gestation and they died within two months of the pregnancy. A second attempt at reviving the ibex was made in 2009. A baby female Pyrenean ibex was born alive to a goat surrogate. Unfortunately it only survived for seven minutes before the baby ibex died from lung defects. Cloning the Pyrenean ibex is a walk in the park compared to the challenges of cloning a woolly mammoth. The ibex was only extinct for three years before a cloning process was undertaken and there was plenty of DNA and genetic material for scientists to attempt the reconstruction of the ibex. The woolly mammoth has been dead for 4,500 years and there's not enough genetic material to spare. If such an attempt is made there will only be a few chances for scientists to get it right.

Of course science could grow enough to produce a living wooly mammoth that will be healthy enough to survive. But then what? One reasonable objection to bringing back dead species is what purpose will the animals serve? If scientists succeed in bringing back the wooly mammoth will it even have a niche to go back to? Extinct species disappeared for a variety of reasons but chief among them is the loss of their natural habitats. Government officials should be able to assure that if the animals are released back to the wild they will still have a forest or tundra to go back to that will be free from human intervention.

More importantly what will happen to the world's only living mammoth? It will be the loneliest animal in the planet. Of course scientists could attempt to clone two mammoths that will be of different genders. Two mammoths won't mean they will go out and repopulate the mammoth species. They wouldn't be genetically diverse enough to survive because they'll both come from the same genetic stock. Even if they cross-breed with modern elephants the offspring will no longer be a wooly mammoth but a hybrid.

So where does that leave us? Cloning a wooly mammoth is possible but not in five years time or even in twenty. And scientists are certainly not close to developing a real-world Jurassic Park.