Scientists in Thailand have begun a project to clone an elephant from the preserved remains of a prize specimen that died more than one hundred years ago.

The Bangkok Post newspaper says a team from the city's Mahidol University wants to use genetic material from a white elephant owned by the nineteen-century monarch King Rama the Third.

The scientists who've already succeeded in cloning a cow say they've been inspired by American efforts to clone a mammoth.

They say the ten-year project will replenish Thailand's wild elephant population, which has dwindled from around 50,000 in the Nineteen Sixties to just two thousand today, mainly due to deforestation.