Pleistocene Park
cwilcox | April 13, 2009The frozen tundra that covers a majority of Russia and northern Asia is a hard place to live. The average winter temperature is 30 below zero, and winter seems to last a lifetime. The short summer, which still gets only glancing rays of sun, barely breaks above freezing. It's so cold year round that part of the ground never defrosts. Without the flowing groundwater and rich sunlight of more southern climates, the tundra cannot support trees. That's its defining trait, really - "tundra" comes from the Finnish word tunturi, meaning treeless plain.
The dominant plant life, thus, are the grasses…
cwilcox | November 21, 2008Well, in light of a mostly-sequenced mammoth genome, a lot of people are getting excited about the idea of cloning mammoths. ScienceBlogs.Com has dedicated their front "THE BUZZ IN THE BLOGOSPHERE" section today to it - and their "Reader Reaction" quote is from me (on a fellow blogger's post) - so go check out what other bloggers have been saying about all this!