The mammoth was found in 2012 on the Siberian island of Mali Liakhovski. A special discovery, but it didn’t stop there. Because it turned out that the mammoth contained a well-preserved turd. This gave Dutch researchers ideas. Scientists took a small sample from the female animal and examined it for traces of bacteria.
Permafrost (an area where the subsurface never completely thaws) has been shown to have done the job. For example, many viable bacteria have been found in turf. These have been developed so that there are now five different types of so-called actinobacteria crawling around a laboratory in Leiden.
“It somehow makes sense that we could give life to bacteria, because permafrost is a big freezer,” researcher Gilles van Wezel tells Trouw. “However, it’s a magical idea,” says the professor of molecular biotechnology at Leiden University.
Together with the microbiologists from Wageningen, Amsterdam and Goes shared Van Wezel recently shared his findings with biologists around the world. Is he afraid that bacteria will eventually take on a life of their own, just like in Jurassic Park? “Not at all. These bacteria aren’t that different.”
