In “Woolly Mammoth to Be Cloned”(Discovery News Dec 5, 2011), Jennifer Viegas reports
Within five years, a woolly mammoth will likely be cloned, according to scientists who have just recovered well-preserved bone marrow in a mammoth thigh bone. Japan’s Kyodo News first reported the find. You can see photos of the thigh bone at this Kyodo page.
Russian scientist Semyon Grigoriev, acting director of the Sakha Republic’s mammoth museum, and colleagues are now analyzing the marrow, which they extracted from the mammoth’s femur, found in Siberian permafrost soil.
It might work, but the reports we’ve heard are not encouraging. For one thing, for the experiment to be more than a brief zoo attraction, the embryos must survive, grow up, and be fertile. That’s a way higher set of bars than just physically existing in some form (or only one paper or in a computer program.)