Scientists To Clone Woolly Mammoth After Russian Researchers Discover Liquid Blood From Carcass [Pic & Video]

Russian reserchers found a frozen woolly mammoth carcass that was perfectly perserved on an Artic Island.

Because the cold helped slow the decomposition considerably, liquid blood was found, which can be cloned, say researchers.

The researchers say the frozen woolly mammoth was in such excellent shape, they found liquid blood when they split open the body's cavities.

"We were really surprised to find mammoth blood and muscle tissue," Semyon Grigoriev said to the Siberian Times.

Girgoriev is the head of the Museum of Mammoths of the Institute of Applied Ecology of the North at the North Eastern Federal University.

"It is the first time we managed to obtain mammoth blood. No-one has ever seen before how the mammoth's blood flows," Girgoriev continued.

The sample was taken from the belly cavity of the 10,000 year old woolly mammoth female, believed to be around 50 or 60 years old at the time of her death.

She died after becoming bogged down in a swamp, but after the upper parts were chewed up by scavengers, the lower parts remained in a cocoon of ice, which has enabled the collection of samples from blood vessels, glands and soft tissue.

The actual temperature of the discovered carcass was -10°â€‹C, which Grigoriev said the mammoth seems to have evolved blood that freezes at a lower temperature than the tropical based pachyderm ancestors.

The discovery has opened up talk about cloning the ice age mammal.

Just last year, Russia's North-Eastern Federal University signed a deal with the South Korean Bioengineering Research Institute for the rights to clone a mammoth from the remains found in the Russian steppes.

Hwang Woo-suk heads the institute but the researcher has been controversial in the past.

He was barred from working on human cell lines and given a two-year suspended jail sentence for falsifying data and breaching ethical guidelines after claiming a series of stunning breakthroughs in human embryonic stem cell research.

Hwang has kept working on animal cloning research though, and led the team that successfully cloned the first dog, an Afghan hound, in 2005. His group also successfully cloned a coyote in 2011.

Hwang's next experiment involves implanting an elephant with a cloned mammouth and resurrecting the extinct species.

The Artic island find of the liquid mammoth blood might make that more of a reality now.