In the icy depths of Siberia’s Verkhoyansk region, a remarkable discovery has sent ripples of excitement through the scientific community. In the summer of 2022, researchers unearthed the extraordinarily well-preserved remains of an extinct bison species in the Khaastaakh district, frozen in permafrost so perfectly that it appeared to have died mere moments ago. This ancient creature, estimated to have roamed the Earth around 8,000 years ago, may hold the key to unlocking secrets of the past—and potentially rewriting the future through cloning.
The bison, though incomplete with only its head, forelimbs, and part of its chest intact, was a breathtaking find. Transported to the Mammoth Museum Library at North-Eastern Federal University (NEFU) in Yakutsk, Russia, the specimen underwent a detailed necropsy—an animal autopsy—to unravel its mysteries. “Preliminarily, this is a young individual, 1.5-2 years old,” said Maxim Cheprasov, head of the NEFU Mammoth Museum. The team’s initial findings confirmed the bison’s age at death, offering a glimpse into its life during a turbulent era in Earth’s history.
The bison lived during the late Pleistocene epoch, a time of dramatic climate shifts and mass extinctions that wiped out many of the planet’s megafauna, including mammoths and mastodons. This period, spanning roughly 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago, was marked by a collapsing food chain and environmental upheaval. For large animals like this bison, survival demanded resilience and adaptation to a rapidly changing world. By studying the preserved tissues extracted during the necropsy, scientists aim to uncover details about the bison’s diet, habits, and how it endured such a challenging environment.
The research team, in collaboration with Korean scientists, is conducting advanced cellular analyses on the bison’s tissues. These studies could reveal not only how this species thrived in a world on the brink of collapse but also whether its DNA holds the potential for a scientific miracle: cloning. The permafrost’s remarkable preservation has left the bison’s tissues in such pristine condition that some experts believe it could be possible to resurrect this long-extinct species. “We are working with a unique find that could be cloned in the future thanks to selected materials,” said Hwang Woo Sok, a professor at NEFU and director of the UAE Biotechnology Research Foundation.
Cloning an animal frozen for millennia is no small feat. Paleogeneticist Love Dalén, who is not involved in the project, cautioned that the process is fraught with challenges. “To make cloning possible, one needs to find intact chromosomes, but what we see even in the best specimens is that each chromosome is fragmented into millions of pieces,” he explained. The odds of success, he noted, are akin to flipping a coin and landing heads a thousand times in a row. Yet, the tantalizing possibility of bringing an ancient species back to life fuels the team’s ambition.
Beyond the dream of cloning, this discovery offers a rare window into Earth’s prehistoric past. Each test conducted on the bison’s remains brings scientists closer to understanding how these majestic creatures navigated a world in crisis. For now, the team celebrates this extraordinary find as a step toward unraveling the mysteries of the planet’s natural history—and perhaps, one day, witnessing a prehistoric bison walk the Earth once more.