Genetic engineering

[Rynn]

Your comment interests me. You might've heard about the projects that are aiming to create a elephant-mammoth hybrid. They plan to do this through germline engineering of an elephant fetus, so that its DNA more closely matchs that of a mammoth. Through successive generations, they plan to eventually create a genetic duplicate of the extinct mammoth.

Heres the question I have. If they eventually create a breeding population of mammoths that are virtually identical to the real thing, wouldn't that have to include similar muscle groups and what not? We know that homo sapiens and homo neanderthal had fairly different musculatures, so wouldn't the same be true for mammoths and elephants?

Are they able to account for variables like that? Is there some trick for influencing myogenisis in the fetus?

The proposed methods for "de-extinction" are fairly crude IMO. The answer to any question in this project along the lines of "how can you ensure what you end up with is a woolly mammoth?" is "we keep breeding it with mammoth DNA over and over until we get something that seems the same". They won't account for variables, the proposal is essentially to brute force it. It's entirely likely any such project will result in many failed pregnancies and adult specimens with a raft of genetic/developmental disorders.