Yes, however you could just have a long haired elephant quite easily. It is conceivable that you might end up with a slightly genetically modified elephant that fills the same ecological niche without genetically being a mammoth. Its easy to see why the author and even the geneticist might choose the term over "genetically engineered elephant" when explaining the concept to the average person.
I've re-upvoted your post because of its relatively substantive core, but please don't lead with snark like "Yeah, right" in comments here. It degrades the community and encourages others to do worse.
Re:Welcome to Pleistocene Park
by gonational on Tuesday January 02, 2018 @12:23PM
(#16053378)
Fun fact: The first definition of "snark" is an imaginary animal...
...which is also, coincidentally, the subject of the comment :)
But, on a serious note: I don't consider "Yeah, right...", followed by an explanation, to be too snarky.
Yeah, right... They make it sound like putting together a child puzzle.
The differences between those 2 genomes can be vast and even if we did know it 100%, it would take a lot of effort to "craft" this DNA into a usable one and after that how would you have variance? You would need to craft at least a couple dozens randomly changing it so they can breed or would we clone the same one over and over again?
I think it's interesting to bring it back, I would even like to see it but it is one weird of a project to say the least.