Free Mammoth Dawn by Kevin J. Anderson, Gregory Benford

waders. They use scanners, hand-held pulse-detectors looking for anomalies in the bog.
    With a flurry of excitement, the workers find a human body, naked, coated with smelly tar. They haul the corpse out of the marsh, jabbering that they may have found a perfectly preserved Pleistocene hunter. His hands are bound behind his back, his mouth gagged, his eyes still open and intact. Is it some indication of ritual sacrifice? The Moscow museum will pay handsomely for such an intact human cadaver. When they clean off the body, though, they are startled to see a modern wristwatch on the arm. Gregor and Psyk look at each other, sharing a smug smile.
    A week earlier, one of the Mammoth Falls diggers had been caught selling fossil ivory tusks on the black market. Gregor has decided to send an appropriate warning to the other workers. He remembers standing in the moonlight watching, far enough away so the black splashes will not get on his clothes, as burly Psyk took great pleasure in drowning the man in tar.
    Now the workers will talk in whispers, spreading the ominous story far and wide. And Gregor’s reputation will grow.
    O O O
    Mammoth Ranch, Montana— Alex Pierce, the idealistic head of genetic research company Helyx, has set up an isolated ranch in Montana where he and his scientist wife Helen study extinction patterns and the loss of Nature’s genetic heritage, leaving vice presidents and CEOs to handle the “drudgery of the business world.” By dedicating his own resources—money acquired through successful genetic-engineering patents—Alex believes he can protect the Earth’s biodiversity, with no strings attached.
    He and Helen have launched a huge undertaking, compiling a “Library of Earth,” a Noah’s Ark that will collect and preserve genetic information of endangered species. Alex sponsors teams of “genetic bounty hunters” who collect DNA samples from around the world. [Estimates of the number of species made extinct every year vary from a few dozen to thousands; all agree that we are currently in the midst of the biggest ongoing “extinction event” in millions of years, a tragedy that is sadly unnoticed by the man on the street.]
    But what good are all these genetic samples, once a species is wiped out? Alex and Helen are working on the process of “reversible extinction,” by which they will bring back certain species that humans have driven to extinction, such as the dodo and passenger pigeon. They accomplish this by replacing the DNA in fertilized eggs of “close-cousin” species so that the animals give birth to hybrids which, after several generations of crossbreeding, yield a pure-blooded animal. “Extinction doesn’t have to be forever!”
    After the discovery of the Mammoth Falls fossil trove, Alex and Helen want to restore the magnificent menagerie that vanished in the Pleistocene Era, believed to have been hunted into extinction by humans. Alex—“Bill Gates with an even bigger social conscience”—hopes that he can reverse this terrible damage. Thanks to the wealth of viable genetic material obtained from Gregor Galaev in Siberia, Alex is well on the road to achieving his dream.
    Meanwhile, Helyx Corp is in a technical race with a Japanese research team, which is also trying to resurrect a mammoth. Unfortunately, their latest generations have all spontaneously aborted. Unlike Helyx’s work, the Japanese are using a much more recent (and much less glamorous) dwarf species of mammoth, which died out only a few thousand years ago. Alex and Helen, however, are in the process of retro-breeding a full-sized woolly mammoth . When he announces this success, Alex will blow all of his rivals out of the water.
    Helyx’s work attracts a few radical protesters, “clean genes” advocates who call themselves Evos. This small but outspoken group is afraid of genetic engineering in any form, especially cloning. A handful of Evo protesters are always at the front gates of the Montana ranch,