Woolly Mammoths
An intereseting discovery from Siberia: a frozen mammoth, with potentially
intact DNA.
We’ve all heard of woolly mammoths. They were close relatives of elephants,
but unlike modern elephants, woolly mammoths were heavily furred and well
adapted for live in cold climates. The lived in the Northern Hemisphere during
the last ice age, mainly near the edges of the ice packs and glaciers. They
went extinct between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago.
One of the best places to find mammoth remains today is in Russian Siberia.
Siberia today is a vast plain, mostly tundra, but also sparsely forested in
places. The northern fringe of it lies north of the Arctic Circle; the rest has
the seasonally cold climate and relatively long winters typical of continental
interiors and far northern latitudes. During the last ice age, half of Siberia
was covered by glaciers, and the remainder was prime mammoth habitat.
This past May, a baby female mammoth was found by a reindeer hunter. He was
understandably shocked when what he thought was a dead reindeer half buried in
snow turned out to be a small elephant. Fortunately, Russia has a scientific
establishment that is used to dealing with the occassional woolly mammoth
carcass.
Here’s the Yahoo News article I found about this:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070711/ts_nm/russia_mammoth_dc_2
The carcass was taken to Salekhard, where mammoth experts from the Russian
Academy of Science’s Zoological Institute have been examining it. And where
they have made an exciting discovery:
…the fact the mammoth was so remarkably well-preserved — its shaggy
coat was gone but otherwise it looked as though it had only recently died –
meant it was a potential treasure trove for scientists.
“Such a unique skin condition protects all the internal organs from
modern microbes and micro-organisms … In terms of its future genetic,
molecular and microbiological studies, this is just an unprecedented
specimen.”
Mammoth skeletons are fairly common in northern latitudes of Europe, Asia,
and North America. Mammoth relatives, mastodons, are very common in Michigan,
where I came from originally. Frozen mammoth carcasses, while rarer, are still
discovered periodically. But to find genetic information in a fossil: that is
something truly extraordinary. Perhaps this new mammoth find will help shed
some light on the relation of mammoths to modern elephants.
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