My hometown paper reports today that scientists, including PSU biochemist Stephan Schuster, have sequenced 80% of an extinct Siberian mammoth. Even more incredibly, we might be on the verge of an Ice Age version of Jurassic Park.

Three years ago, Japanese scientists said they planned to find frozen mammoth sperm and impregnate an elephant and raise the offspring in a safari park in Siberia. But using genetics to engineer a mammoth makes more sense, Schuster said.

Anthropology professor Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said he no longer considers such ideas impossible. Poinar, who wasn't part of Schuster's study but consulted on the movie Jurassic Park, said director Steven Spielberg may have had it right when he told skeptical scientists: "This is the science of eventuality."

For those of us who unabashedly love Jurassic Park, this sounds so cool I want to jump out of my seat with joy. But let us not forget Ian Malcom's chidings. To paraphrase, just because you think you can engineer extinct animals doesn't mean you should stop yourself from considering whether you should engineer extinct animals.

But Jurassic Park dreams aside, the coolest thing in this is that we are learning about evolutionary rates.

Elephants and mammoths - comparable in size at about 8 to 14 feet tall - diverged along evolutionary paths about 6 million years ago, about the same time humans and chimps did, Schuster said. But there are twice as many differences between the genetic makeup of chimps and humans as those between elephants and mammoths.

"Primates evolved twice as fast as elephants," Schuster said. But some animals such as rodents have had even more evolutionary changes, indicating that it might have to do with size or metabolism, said study co-author Webb Miller.

Another interesting finding is that in the 50 or so species with mostly mapped genomes, there are certain areas where the genetic code is exactly the same in all the animals - except the mammoth.

Pretty cool stuff. With each new finding we see more and more of the tree of life through deep time up to the present.