There’s a new addition to the “tiny ancient animals I’d like to have as a pet” list: a mini-mammoth that stood about three feet high. It joins Sifrhippus, the first horse, which shrank to the size of a cat as the climate warmed about 56 million years ago.

The obvious market for teeny pet horses suggested that there could be a fortune in Sifrhippus clones. But that was pie-in-the-sky thinking, because no one is trying to clone ancient horses. The Russians and Koreans, however, are at least trying to clone a mammoth. The Russians have the frozen mammoth tissue, and the Koreans have Hwang Woo Suk, who faked evidence of human cloning but did successfully clone a dog. So he has experience with pets.

Fossil teeth of the mini-mammoth were found in Crete and had been in the Natural History Museum in London for more than a hundred years. They had been identified mistakenly as coming from dwarf elephants. Victoria L. Herridge and Adrian M. Lister recently re-examined the fossils and determined that they belonged to a mammoth, the smallest ever identified. The mini-mammoths, say the researchers, may have appeared on Crete sometime between 800,000 and 3.5 million years ago. The discovery was reported in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.