Thursday, February 18, 2021

A "Mammoth" Discovery

 Genetic sequencing has given us an insight into the origin of the extinct woolly mammoth.

Three very old specimens from Siberia were analyzed and only the youngest turned out to be a woolly mammoth.

Of the other two, one was a steppe mammoth, the ancestor of the woolly mammoths (and we now know they were hairy too).

The third was genetically distinct and instead of matching to other Siberian mammoths, appears to be an ancestor of the mammoths that lived in North America.

They didn't get a full sequence, but they got enough.

(Don't get me started on whether we should try to clone them. I can't even agree with myself on that one).

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