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

“Now that the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth,” he said.

He intends to use a technique pioneered in 2008 by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology, was successful in cloning a mouse from the cells of another mouse that had been frozen for 16 years.

The nuclei will be inserted into the egg cells of an African elephant, which will act as the surrogate mother for the mammoth.