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Ancient DNA discovery could be game-changer for woolly mammoth de-extinction efforts.
Elma was a healthy mammoth, but that didn't help her much when the hunters targeted her.
Spot the difference!
It's, by far, the most complete and best-preserved woolly mamoth ever found in Noth America.
The odds of a fossil being near you is never quite zero.
Now that's a big steak!
The 20,000-year-old remains of a mammoth bear signs of human hunting and butchery.
It's as spooky as it is fascinating.
This might be the earliest example of a mammoth trap.
They died-off suddenly -- but perhaps not dramatically.
You are what you eat...
Researchers say that the study marks a "significant step toward bringing mammoths back from the dead."
Caveburgers, anyone?
A 40,000-year-old baby horse recovered from Siberian ice may help de-extinct species.
Juvenile mammoths cared for wounded members of their herd, similarly to their modern-day descendants, the African Elephants.
He's fat AND big boned. Well, was. Now he's just big boned.
They were cuter and silkier... but less adapted to a harsh environment.
Well preserved fossils were supposed to be easy.
A team at University of Chicago made the most comprehensive woolly mammoth genome sequencing ever. By comparing its genome with that of its distant cousins, the Asian and African elephants, the researchers were able to determine which are the mammoth's specific genes. These were ran with libraries and repositories to identify what these do. We now know which of mammoth's gene shaped its uncanny skull and small ears, how it got hair to cover all its body or how the mammoth adapted a special fat metabolism and cold coping mechanism. To test their findings, the researchers transplanted a mammoth gene into a human cell. The kidney cell produced new proteins which were tolerant to heat or cold, as suspected showing their other genetic determinations are also likely correct.
Cloning the woolly mammoth is a life long dream for many geneticists and biologists, but the challenges are numerous. Now, we've come a step closer after researchers replaced snips of elephant DNA with those from the woolly mammoth. The changes they've made so far are stable, and even though there's still much work ahead, little by little scientists are building the mammoth's genome one piece at a time. Next stop: actually cloning the mammoth, effectively resurrecting the species back from the dead.
In nothing short of an astonishing find, Russian scientists have discovered a wonderfully preserved female mammoth carcass – the first in the world – in the icy tundra of Siberia. The muscle tissue was found to be extremely well preserved, but what simply caught the researchers by surprise, followed by the whole scientific community in […]
So far… it’s re-extinction Almost 10 years ago, on July 30, 2003, a team of Spanish and French scientists reversed time. They brought an animal back from extinction, if only just to see it go extinct again. The animal they revived was a kind of wild goat known as a bucardo, or Pyrenean ibex. For […]
No, this is not the prologue for a Steven Spielberg movie. Yevgeny Salinde, a 11 year old boy, found what’s been later identified as a 30,000 year-old perfectly preserved mammoth carcass while strolling near his home in Russia’s far north, some 3,000 kilometers away from Moscow. The boy told his parents, who work at the […]
As it turns out, no one single factor was powerful enough to wipe out the woolly mammoth – instead, a sum of factors acted towards their demise, much like many animals are threatened today. Woolly mammoths roamed the globe for 250.000 years, wandering from North America to Europe to Asia, until they were driven extinct […]
After the great dinosaur extinction some 65 million years ago, mammals finally had their big shot as numerous niches became free for the taking. Thus, from mouse size, some mammal species surfaced which were as large as a bus, the so called mammal megafauna, like mammoths, giant sloths or saber-tooth tigers. However, a dire trial of their […]
Scientists from Russia and Japan searching in the permafrost soil in Siberia have found mammoth remains so well-preserved that they believe they will actually be able to clone it, using its bone marrow. Teams from Sakha Republic’s mammoth museum and Japan’s Kinki University have embarked on this quest, vowing to find how this can be […]
They didn’t actually use other mastodons as killer pets, instead it’s been found that early hunters used mastodon bones for making deadly sharp spear heads. One interesting consequence to this is that Mastodon game season seems to have opened 800 years earlier than previously thought, offering a possible explanation for the blitzkrieg mass extinction of […]
Fossil hunting is for anybody – no matter how old, or how knowledgeable; all you need is a little information and some basic equipment, and you’re good to go. For Andrew Carroll and Thomas Smith, two North Texas sixth-graders, it required even less. Their adventures started when they found a bone while off playing and […]
Using DNA preserved for 25.000 – 43.000 years in bones from Siberian mammoths, a team of international scientists recreated mammoth hemoglobin and studied it, revealing interesting facts about the fascinating animals. “It has been remarkable to bring a complex protein from an extinct species, such as the mammoth, back to life,” says Professor Alan Cooper, […]
An amateur Dutch archaeologist named Jan Meulmeester made a startling find which pleases scientists: an amazing collection of 28 flint hand-axes, dated by archaeologists to be around 100,000 years-old. He found them in an area about 13km off Great Yarmouth. Jan Meulmeester diggs regularly for mammoth bones and fossils in marine sand and gravel delivered […]
