It's about time, right? According London's Telegraph newspaper, woolly mammoths could be walking the Earth as soon as five years from now. Japanese scientists announced their intention this week to use cloning technology to bring back the ancient beast.

The scientists are using a frozen mammoth carcass currently stored in a Russian laboratory to extract cells for the cloning process.

Akira Iritani, a professor at Kyoto University, is reactivating his campaign to resurrect the species that died out 5,000 years ago. "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.

Which means, of course, that before we know it, we'll be seeing scenes like this all over America:

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