Semyon Grigoriev via AFP - Getty

A May 13 photo provided by the Yakutsk-based North-Eastern Federal University shows a researcher working near a partial carcass of a female mammoth found on a remote island in the Arctic Ocean. Russian scientists claim that blood has been extracted from the carcass.

Russian researchers say they've recovered blood samples from a 10,000-year-old mammoth carcass found in Siberia, but outside experts are skeptical about the claims — and particularly about suggestions that the mammoth can be cloned.

"What makes the news here is that they have the liquid," Stephan Schuster, a biologist at Penn State who helped decode the woolly mammoth genome several years ago, told NBC News. "But this could also be water that is now thawing and is running out with organic compounds that are in the carcass."

The research team from North-Eastern Federal University in the Siberian city of Yakutsk says it's blood.

"The blood is very dark," Semyon Grigoriev, who headed the expedition to the Lyakhovsky Islands in the Siberian Arctic, said Wednesday in a university news release.

"It was found in ice cavities below the belly, and when we broke these cavities with a poll pick, the blood came running out. Interestingly, the temperature at the time of excavation was -7 to -10 degrees C [14 to 19 degrees Fahrenheit]. It may be assumed that the blood of mammoths had some cryoprotective properties," he said.

It's difficult for Schuster or other outside experts to render judgment on the claims, since the only information available on the find is what's in the press. "I have no doubt that they have found something interesting, but what exactly it is ... is hard to say at this moment," Daniel Fisher, an expert on mammoths at the University of Michigan, told Scientific American's Kate Wong.

Schuster said it's conceivable that the fluid contains natural antifreeze. Experts have found that to be the case for lots of modern-day organisms in chilly environments. "It could come from the breakdown of biopolymers," he said. "You have a lot of small organic components that would have the properties of being cryoprotective."

AFP - Getty Images

Preserved muscle tissue from the carcass of a female mammoth takes on a reddish tinge when cut.

The Russian reports suggest that the partial female carcass is unusually well-preserved. Fragments of the mammoth's muscle tissues "have a natural red color of fresh meat," Grigoriev reported. That's not unprecedented, however. There have been numerous reports about the recovery of mammoth meat that's good enough to eat.

The big question focuses on what you can do with that preserved tissue and blood (or bloodlike goop).

"What they are saying without saying it is, 'Oh, if we have blood, then the rest of the carcass might yield clonable DNA," Schuster said. After all, Grigoriev is one of the leaders of the Russian-Korean "Mammoth Miracle" cloning project. He's quoted as saying that the carcass had to be recovered in cold weather, "because the unique discovery would melt in summer or autumn, and the priceless material for the joint project 'Mammoth Rebirth' ... could disappear from thawing and wild animals."

The scientists who are working on the project have said a woolly mammoth could be cloned sometime in the next five years, but Schuster and other researchers involved in studying mammoth genetics are skeptical that there'd be enough intact DNA in any thawed-out sample to do the deed. So far, the best places to find mammoth DNA have been from the teeth, bones and hair rather than from the muscles or tendons — and even then, the pickings have been slim.

"None of us has ever seen a sample from a mammoth where the genome has not been completely shattered," Schuster said. "The maximum we find is 100 base pairs, maybe 400 base pairs. You would need on the order of millions of base pairs, and there's no such thing."

Even if the DNA isn't intact, it may still be possible to extract proteins from the tissues, just as proteins were extracted from the fossilized bone of a Tyrannnosaurus rex several years ago. Schuster said working toward that goal would be exciting as well as realistic.

"The case is rare enough, that everything inside the carcass needs to be investigated in the fullest," he said. "Only after this has been done can we assess whether this find will really advance our understanding of the biochemical makeup of a mammoth. But I am less optimistic about learning more about the genetic makeup."

More about mammoths:

• Discredited scientist leads mammoth effort
• Primo mammoth found, but it can't be cloned
• Cosmic Log archive on mammoths

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Russian and South Korean scientists, including the cloning expert who was the focus of a stem-cell scandal six years ago, have signed a deal to try re-creating a woolly mammoth using cells recovered from 10,000-year-old frozen remains.

The papers for the joint research project were signed on Tuesday by Hwang Woo-Suk, chief technology officer for South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation; and Vasily Vasiliev, vice director of Russia's North-Eastern Federal University, during a ceremony at Hwang's office in Seoul.

Hwang is infamous for his role in human embryonic stem-cell research: In 2004 and 2005, he and his colleagues claimed to have extracted stem cells from what they characterized as the world's first cloned human embryos. But in late 2005, his work was found to have been based on fabricated data, and he was barred from continuing research with human cells.

Despite the disgrace, Hwang continued working with animal cloning techniques. Before the scandal broke, his team announced that they produced the world's first cloned dog, nicknamed Snuppy, and that claim has stood up to scrutiny. Last October, Hwang's team at Sooam unveiled eight cloned coyotes that had been produced by injecting nuclei from coyote skin cells into dog eggs. At the time, he said he was interested in cloning an endangered African dog species known as the lycaon ... and was interested in cloning a mammoth, too.

In December, Japanese news media said that scientists recovered a seemingly viable sample of bone marrow from a frozen mammoth thigh bone in Russia's Sakha Republic, and that a mammoth could be cloned back from extinction within five years. This week, Agence France-Presse reported that North-Eastern Federal University is working with the Japanese scientists and with the Koreans. The Beijing Genomics Institute is said to be taking part in the Korean-Russian project as well.

Reports from Seoul suggest that the mammoth-cloning effort could be launched this year if the Russians can ship the remains to Sooam's laboratory. "The first and hardest mission is to restore mammoth cells," a colleague of Hwang's at Sooam, Hwang In-Sung, told AFP.

Jung Yeon-Je / AFP - Getty Images

South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk, (far left) and Vasily Vasiliev, vice director of North-Eastern Federal University of Russia's Sakha Republic (far right), exchange agreements during a signing ceremony on joint research at Hwang's office in Seoul on Tuesday.

Sooam Biotech Research / AFP - Getty Images

This diagram released by the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation shows the process of replacing the nuclei of elephant egg cells with those taken from the mammoth's somatic cells to bring a mammoth back to life.

The plan calls for extracting nuclei from the thawed-out mammoth cells, putting them into elephant egg cells and stimulating the cells to start dividing. Embryos would be implanted into elephant wombs for gestation — and if the effort is successful, a mother elephant would give birth to a baby mammoth around 22 months later.

That's a big "if," as I wrote in December when I discussed the Japanese-Russian project. In addition to the usual problems surrounding interspecies cloning, it's highly doubtful that genetic material recovered from tissue that's been frozen for millennia would be sufficiently intact for extraction and implantation. What do you think of Hwang's chances? Feel free to register your vote at right, and voice your opinion in the comment section below.

More about mammoths:

• Clone a mammoth? Not so fast
• Mammoths mated with a different elephant species
• Mammoth resurrection on the way?
• Woolly mammoth's DNA mapped

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Reports from Japan suggest that long-extinct woolly mammoths could be cloned back into existence within five years, but don't hold your breath.

"C'mon, it'll never happen. Not in my lifetime," said Webb Miller, a Penn State computer scientist and genomicist who helped decipher the genetic code of a woolly mammoth.

Japanese and Russian researchers have been working for years to find a suitable woolly mammoth specimen in the Siberian permafrost, and they recently told Japan's Kyodo news service that they recovered what they hope will be viable bone marrow from a frozen thigh bone recovered near Batagay in eastern Russia's Sakha Republic (a.k.a. Yakutia).

Their plan is to take the nuclei from bone marrow cells, transplant them into egg cells extracted from elephants, and implant the cloned embryos into the wombs of mama elephants for gestation. This is the technique that has given rise to cloned mammals ranging from Dolly the sheep to pigs, cats, dogs and monkeys.

Kyodo's report says "there is a high likelihood" that biologically active nuclei can be extracted from the frozen marrow. Researchers on the case include Russian experts from Yakutsk's Mammoth Museum and Japanese biologists from Kinki University in Osaka Prefecture. Kyodo said a full-fledged joint research project would be launched next year.

Woolly mammoths haven't walked the earth for thousands of years, but the idea of resurrecting the species seems to have a powerful hold on the collective psyche. Some folks have even talked about setting aside a "Pleistocene Park" for mammoths and other Ice Age animals.

Miller, however, isn't buying it.

"DNA from a woolly mammoth is a mess," he explained. "It's fractured into very short pieces, and there's a lot of postmortem DNA damage other than just breakage. The code gets damaged a lot."

Even if the DNA is intact and the nuclei are successfully merged with elephant egg cells, the success rate for cloning animals — and particularly extinct and near-extinct species — is not good. Generally speaking, there are scores of failures for each successful pregnancy brought to term.

A couple of years ago, scientists succeeded in producing a Pyrenean ibex from tissue that was taken from the last representative of the subspecies in 1999, but the cloned progeny survived for only seven minutes. Attempts to clone an Asian gaur didn't end much better. Australian researchers had to scrap plans to clone the Tasmanian tiger back from extinction, although they later succeeded in transferring part of a Tasmanian tiger gene into mouse embryos.

These cases suggest that there's not much of a chance of re-creating the mammoths. Genetic engineering may eventually produce a "hairy elephant" with mammoth-like characteristics. But a creature genetically identical to the behemoths of the Ice Age? "If somebody does that, I will eat my hat," Miller said. "And I'll wonder why they did it."

Miller said studying the DNA of long-extinct species has value, even if the efforts don't result in a resurrection.

"I'm looking out my window, and 13,000 years ago, there were some really interesting animals out there," he mused. "They're gone now, and I'd like to know why. ... Understanding which species survived and which ones didn't, looking at their genome and trying to figure that out, that's interesting to me."

But when it comes to living, breathing animals, "I'm personally more interested in keeping the species we have," Miller said. "I'd like to keep tigers around for a while."

Despite Miller's qualms, the quest to re-create the woolly mammoth could well continue for the next five years or longer. And that's not all. Paleontologist Jack Horner is moving ahead with his plan to modify chicken DNA and make the barnyard birds look more like the dinosaurs they descended from. Dino-chickens vs. woolly mammephants? That sounds like a great plot for the next "Jurassic Park" sequel. ... 

More about mammoths:

• X-ray scans reveal baby mammoth mysteries
• Dog skull found with mammoth bone in mouth
• Mammoths mated with a different elephant species
• Mammoth resurrection on the way?
• Woolly mammoth's DNA mapped

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The long-extinct woolly mammoth could be resurrected within five years, thanks to recent advances in cloning technology.

Japanese researchers plan to collect mammoth tissue this summer from a carcass that was frozen in the Siberian permafrost and is now in a Russian research laboratory, according to a report in the Yomiuri Shimbun.

The hope is to recover an undamaged nucleus of a mammoth cell from this tissue and insert it into an elephant egg cell from which the nucleus has been removed. This will create an embryo with mammoth genes, according to the news report.

This embryo will be inserted to the elephant's womb in hopes that she'll give birth to a mammoth.

"Preparations to realize this goal have been made," Akira Iritani, a team leader from Kyoto University, told the Yomiuri Shimbun.

New technique
Previous attempts to recover nuclei from frozen tissue failed because the cold temperatures damaged the DNA.

The new technique is based on work by Teruhiko Wakayama of the Riken Center for Developmental Biology, who in 2008 cloned a mouse from the cells of another mouse that were frozen for 16 years.

Iritani says his team has devised a method to extract the nuclei of mammoth cells without damaging them. "Now that the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth," he told London's Daily Telegraph.

Mammoth for display
If the team is successful in creating an embryo, they will discuss how to breed the mammoth — and whether or not to display it to the public — before transplanting to a surrogate elephant, Iritani told the Yomiuri Shimbun.

Even if the embryo is successfully created and implanted, the chances of bringing a cloned mammoth to term (or any cloned animal, for that matter) are slim. When South Korean researchers tried cloning dogs, for example, nearly 1,100 embryos were transplanted to surrogate dogs, but only two live births resulted, and only one of those puppies survived past the 22-day mark. 

Nevertheless, Iritani was confident of success. "After the mammoth is born, we'll examine its ecology and genes to study why the species became extinct and other factors," he said.

Woolly mammoths went extinct at the end of the Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago. Scientists have long debated whether climate change or human hunters were the cause of their demise.

Last December, researchers said another factor could be the fact that the creatures delayed weaning their young due to the long dark winter north of the Arctic Circle.

More about mammoths:

• Woolly mammoth's DNA mapped
• Mammoth blood revived by bacteria
• Ice Age baby mammoth goes on display
• Scientist sets out to re-create Ice Age park

The inside story behind the costly quest to clone dogs reveals at least as much about human nature as it does about copying man's best friend.

"It says a lot more about the human condition, actually," Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Woestendiek, author of the book "Dog, Inc.," told me this week. Woestendiek became involved in the saga back in 2005, when he was covering the pet beat for the Baltimore Sun. That was the year that marked the birth of the world's first cloned dog, Snuppy, in South Korea.

During the years that followed, Woestendiek became more engrossed in the economics and the emotions that drove the international efforts to create (and, not incidentally, market) cloned pets. When the commercial pet-cloning market notched its first sale in 2008, the South Koreans set a list price of $150,000. "It's $100,000 now, and they've said all along that as they get better at it, the price will keep dropping," Woestendiek said. "Maybe it'll be $25,000 someday. But it'll still be a lot."

The main characters in "Dog, Inc." include scientists and entrepreneurs as well as pet lovers who scraped together the cash to buy carbon copies of their animal companions. And these folks aren't mere puppy dogs. There's a lot of bite to this tale:

• The top researchers behind the dog-cloning experiments, Woo-Suk Hwang and Lee Byeong-chun, got into the field knowing that there was money to be made — and for a time they were involved in competing ventures. However, both of them had to deal with disgrace and criminal charges related to South Korea's stem-cell scandal. Ultimately, Hwang and Lee both distanced themselves from the business side of pet cloning.
• Maverick billionaire John Sperling put an estimated $20 million into dog-cloning research, specifically to clone Missy, the mixed-breed dog owned by his longtime friend and lover, Joan Hawthorne. Hawthorne's son Lou got "Project Missyplicity" started with the aid of Texas A&M researchers. The project led to the first cloned cat in 2001, but Texas A&M withdrew from the race to clone dogs. In the end, Missy's clones were produced not by Texas A&M, but by Hwang's team in Korea.
• The first paying customer for a cloned dog, Bernann McKinney, received a $100,000 discount from RNL Bio, the South Korean company that was headed up by Lee Byeong-chun. She still had to arrange for the sale of family property to help pay for having her dear, departed pit bull, Booger, cloned from tissue samples. McKinney benefited from a Booger bonanza: five genetically identical clones that landed her on network TV. But it wasn't long before her past caught up with her. Follow-up reports focused on a sex-abduction scandal from the 1970s as well as burglary charges from 2004. 

Woo-Suk Hwang via AP file

In this 2005 photo, 2-month-old Snuppy, the world's first cloned dog, appears at right alongside the 3-year-old male Afghan hound whose skin cells were used to clone him

Woestendiek, who watched Hwang at work in Seoul as part of his research for the book, provides ample evidence that cloning isn't the smooth, high-tech operation some folks might think it is. The failures greatly outnumber the successes. To produce Snuppy, for example, eggs had to be extracted from about 115 dogs. More than 1,000 cloned embryos were implanted into 123 dogs — but only three pregnancies resulted, and Snuppy was the only cloned offspring that lived more than a few weeks.

Identical genes, but not the same
Some folks might also think cloned animals are identical copies of the original cell donor, but "Dogs, Inc." dispels that myth as well. Woestendiek tells how the birth of the first cloned cat, CC (for "Carbon Copy"), angered Lou Hawthorne because the cloned kitty didn't look anything like its genetic twin. (The reason is a phenomenon known as X-linked inactivation.) Even if the animals look the same, they don't act the same, as Joan Hawthorne found out when she finally took delivery of a Missy clone, MissyTwo.

"They're not at all alike," she was quoted as saying. "Missy was robust and completely calm. Missy wouldn't come through my home and knock over every wine glass."

Woestendiek writes that "the flabbergasting fact was — after 11 years of research on two continents; after all the trials and errors; after all the testing, harvesting, micromanipulating, zapping, implanting and legal wrangling; after an estimated $20 million of her friend's money was poured into creating a clone of Missy — Joan Hawthorne didn't want the dog."

That outcome carries a lesson for anyone who might be contemplating human cloning — or might believe that cloning a human would create an eerie doppleganger or a soulless robot. In fact, the procedure would merely create a time-delayed twin who would lead his or her own life.

"A lot of people have the impression that if you clone someone or something, it's the same being back again — which is probably the result of too many science-fiction movies," Woestendiek said.

'Close to folly'
There's deep irony in the fact that some people have spent tens of thousands of dollars in hopes of re-creating one special dog, while thousands of other dogs are being put to death every day in America. And that irony isn't lost on Woestendiek. After spending five years researching a book on the subject, Woestendiek has come to the conclusion that pet cloning is not that hot of an idea.

"You're sort of capitalizing on people during a time of grief,," he told me. "Most often, the whole quest to clone a dog, and the subsequent marketing, is pretty close to folly, in my opinion. But I tried not to be too opinionated in the book."

The venture that Sperling's money created, Genetic Savings & Clone, went out of business four years ago. Today, the South Korean company RNL Bio is the only outfit offering to clone dogs for a price. RNL says it plans to be cloning 500 dogs a year by 2012, but Woestendiek wonders just how realistic that projection will prove to be.

"It hasn't grown by the leaps and bounds that they anticipated, partly because cloning's kind of trial and error, not an automatic thing," he said. "I don't know whether it will become a huge thing. I doubt it. It'll be a thing that rich people do."

It's definitely not a thing Woestendiek plans to do, even though he says his dog Ace is "totally cloneworthy."

"Doubling, tripling or quadrupling my dog would be an insult to his uniqueness," he explained in a Q&A provided by his publisher. "And it would lead to such high expectations for the copies that they could probably never live up to it."

More about the science of dogs:

• How science measures up cats and dogs
• Dogs sneak food when we're not looking
• Dogs were dumbed down by domestication
• Size matters when it comes to canine smarts
• Still more pet health coverage from msnbc.com

To see what Woestendiek and his dog are up to nowadays, check out the "Travels With Ace" website as well as Woestendiek's Ohmidog blog.

Connect with Cosmic Log by "liking" our Facebook page or hooking up on Twitter, and check out "The Case for Pluto," science editor Alan Boyle's book about Pluto and the planet quest.