An extraordinary report was made public by a group of scientists from Japan. It is for the first time in human history that the tissue of a 16 year-old frozen mouse was successfully used in a cloning process.

The tissue was used to produce four healthy mice, spawning many theories about the countless possibilities brought by this bio-tech breakthrough. A similar scenario was used for the Jurassic Park movie, with prehistoric animals brought back to life, but at the time such a procedure was considered unrealistic. Now, many believe that it won’t be long until prehistoric mammals located in the arctic tundra will provide all the needed elements to bring back some of the animals we’ve lost during Earth’s evolution.

The study was presented in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was conducted by Sayaka Wakayama of the Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe.

“It’s not the first time that dead animals have been resurrected,” said George E. Seidel Jr. of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, editor of the study. “But previously they were stored much colder than these temperatures and they were generally treated in a special way.” The focus will now be turned on the possibility of bringing back animals such as the woolly mammoth, a huge creature that weighed as much as 6 tons, which originated in Eurasia more than 250,000 years ago and disappeared by the end of the Pleistocene era about 10,000 B.C.

"It would be very difficult, but our work suggests that it is no longer science fiction," team leader Teruhiko Wakayama of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, said during an interview with New Scientist magazine.