The Speculist

First there was this startling announcement:

A frozen mammoth dug up from the Siberian tundra has been unveiled in central Japan in a preview of the six-month World Exposition, which is expected to draw millions of tourists.

A group of Russian and Japanese scientists hope to clone mammoths from the animal’s remains by using elephant egg cells.

The multimillion-dollar project between Russia and Japan to examine the beast is intended to find out why mammoths became extinct in the Ice Age.

And then this one:

For more than a century, the study of dinosaurs has been limited to fossilized bones. Now, researchers have recovered 70-million-year-old soft tissue, including what may be blood vessels and cells, from a Tyrannosaurus rex.

If scientists can isolate proteins from the material, they may be able to learn new details of how dinosaurs lived, said lead researcher Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University.

If the Japanese scientists are able to pull of their ambitious mammoth project, what are the chances that we might get to see an actual living dinosaur one of these days?

I guess that's still pretty hard to say, but I'll tell you one thing for sure. They're definitely going up.