See my take on this here: https://www.readcodon.com/p/extinction
Basically, it will be quite challenging and I think they are over-promising on the timeline. They are also not even going to make a wooly mammoth, but rather a hairy elephant.
Basically, it will be quite challenging and I think they are over-promising on the timeline. They are also not even going to make a wooly mammoth, but rather a hairy elephant.
The mammoth lived in an ecosystem that no longer exists: the mammoth steppes and all associated plants and wildlife. This is an important reason (perhaps even the main reason) they went extinct in the first place.
This is another problem with de-extinction for some species: what do you do with the animals once you've got them? For mammoths it's an open question if they could survive in the wild even if they're exact clones of the original, and even more so if they're "hairy elephants".
Either way, whatever will happen with these "hairy elephant", they most likely won't evolve in to mammoths as they existed 20,000 years ago.
Regarding the female African elephant percentage discrepancy, both of which seem to be pulled from the same paper, it seems 33% refers to new born and 51% refers to all females.