Mice resurrection may not seem like a big deal, but it is. From National Geographic:

Using cells from dead mice frozen for 16 years, a team of Japanese geneticists has successfully created healthy clones of the dead animals.

The breakthrough, researchers say, could pave the way for resurrecting extinct animals, such as the woolly mammoth, from frozen remains, experts say.

“We have demonstrated that even frozen animal tissue can be used to produce clones,” said Teruhiko Wakayama, a geneticist at the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan.

John Critser is a veterinary pathobiologist at the University of Missouri, Columbia, who has previously transplanted elephant ovarian tissue into mice to produce elephant eggs.

He found the study technically elegant, and added that “it is possible one might find some tissue from some endangered species where the genetic material is preserved well enough to perform [the cloning technique] nuclear transfer, and try to resurrect it.”

But he cautions that the frozen remains of extinct species could expose infectious diseases not seen since the animal became extinct. “That adds another level of concern,” he added.

Go ahead and bring back woolly mammoths and their germs. We need more microbes to fight. On the flipside, the newly returned animal may not be able to handle the newer diseases that are present in the environment now. They could be alive for a bit, then succumbed to something that most immune systems in healthy, modern mammals could have shrugged off.