Archive for the ‘Mammoth’ Category

Awesome! Hear the Sounds of Dinosaurs!

Saturday, July 14th, 2012

In the movie, Jurassic Park, sound designer Ben Burtt tried to create what he thought prehistoric beasts might’ve sounded like when they walked the Earth. Using currently existing animals and a little exaggeration, no one will ever forget the sounds Uncle George’s sound guru created.

Now an art installation in France created by Marguerite Humeau is bringing us as close as we may get to what they might have actually sounded like and it’s pretty awesome to hear.

Titled ‘Proposal for Resuscitating Prehistoric Creatures’, the exhibit displays the recreated vocal chords of three different prehistoric animals: the entelodont, known as the ‘hell pig’, the mammoth imperator and the ambulocetus, known as the ‘walking whale.’

Because the vocal chords are made of soft tissue, Humeau has spent years working with researchers in various fields from throat specialists to engineers to paleaontologists to get everything in order to recreate as accurately as possible. Humeau also gathered data on these particular animals current ancestors: an Asian Elephant for the mammoth, dolphins and harbors porpoises for the ‘walking whale’ (which is pretty damn frightening to consider this whale had ridiculous teeth…and it walked) and a wild boar for the ‘hell pig’ (again…frightening).

Using foam, similar soft materials and an enormous amount of data collected over several years about these animals, Humeau stated:

“I’m not only recreating a shape, but also the data that has disappeared — we’ll never be 100 per cent sure this is accurate,” Humeau told Wired Magazine UK. “But when I heard it roar, it felt real.”

Why are you still reading this? Press play and listen to what it might’ve sounded like 50 million years ago when a ‘hell pig’, a ‘walking whale’ (again…a walking whale..with freakin’ teeth) and a mammoth just casually strolled the planet.

[DesignBoom]

Woolly Mammoths By 2015?

Sunday, January 16th, 2011

One man is on a mission to bring woolly mammoths back from the dead. A technique for successfully recovering frozen cells to use in creating clones was pioneered in 2008 by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology.  Now Akira Iritani, a professor at Kyoto University, plans to use the results in a quest to bring the woolly mammoth back to life.

“Now the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth,” he told The Daily Telegraph.

Professor Iritani estimates about 2 years to successfully implant an embryo into an elephant, followed by a 600-day gestation period.  He will be travelling to Siberia this summer in search of specimens.

[The Telegraph]

Smithsonian Has Pickled Mammoth

Thursday, November 25th, 2010

“Acquired by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in 1922, these jars contain preserved muscle tissue taken from the left hind leg of a woolly mammoth uncovered in 1901 by palaeontologist Eugene Pfizenmayer – though they aren’t on public display.”

Awesome.

[New Scientist]