Obviously mammoths are coming out with a book or a movie

Why else would their publicists be making them hit the headlines right now?

In southwestern Germany, an American archaeologist and his German colleagues have found the oldest mammoth-ivory carving known to modern science. And even at 35,000 years old, it's still intact.

Archaeologists at the University of Tübingen have recovered the first entirely intact woolly mammoth figurine from the Swabian Jura, a plateau in the state of Baden-Württemberg, thought to have been made by the first modern humans some 35,000 years ago. It is believed to be the oldest ivory carving ever found. "You can be sure," Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas J. Conard told SPIEGEL ONLINE, "that there has been art in Swabia for over 35,000 years."

(photo from article)

And in Siberia:

A baby mammoth unearthed in the permafrost of north-west Siberia could be the best preserved specimen of its type, scientists have said.

The frozen carcass is to be sent to Japan for detailed study.

The six-month-old female calf was discovered on the Yamal peninsula of Russia and is thought to have died 10,000 years ago.

Maybe this is the reason (from the same article):

Some scientists hold out hope that well preserved sperm or other cells containing viable DNA could be used to resurrect the mammoth lineage.

Despite the inherent difficulties, Dr Agenbroad remains optimistic about the potential for cloning.

"When we got the Jarkov mammoth [found frozen in Taimyr, Siberia, in 1997], the geneticists told me: 'if you can get us good DNA, we'll have a baby mammoth for you in 22 months'," he told BBC News.

Ohhhkaaay... Have we thought about what it would mean to bring back wooly mammoths? Into zoos? For fun? For scientific purposes? Because we can?

Sheesh! Didn't anybody watch Jurassic Park?

Update 7/17: Cloning mammoths will not happen:

SPIEGEL: Researchers are falling all over themselves to examine the intact baby mammoth found in the permafrost of Siberia. Will scientists be able to clone it?

Hofreiter: Cloning a mammoth isn't possible: Anyone who says otherwise shouldn't be taken seriously. For a successful cloning, you would need intact cells complete with organelles and DNA in chromosome form. What we have is the genome in millions of pieces -- they are just fragmentary. At the most, one could replace single genes, as is done with mice. But to transform an Asian elephant into a mammoth would require millions of substitutions.