Randolph E. Schmid, Associated Press
Sept. 27, 2007 — Attacking several tons of woolly mammoth with stone-tipped spears must have taken extraordinary courage — and ancient people left paintings to prove they did it.
Now, scientists are approaching mammoths in a different way, extracting DNA from their dense coats in an effort to learn more about them.
Mammoths are extinct, of course. No one knows if the cause was climate change, hungry Neanderthals or something else — but they left behind remains, often frozen in the tundra.
Attempts have been made to sequence their DNA from frozen animals, but that can be complicated by contamination.
Researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science, however, that mammoth hair seems to be an excellent source of well-preserved DNA.
"It is important to understand the genetic makeup of an organism before it went extinct," explained lead researcher Stephan C. Schuster of Penn State University.
They try to understand the relationship between different groups of animals, especially ones that are highly endangered, to learn whether those might face a similar fate, said Schuster, an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology.
Discovery News correspondent James Williams joins fossil hunters at the heart of a dig.
Get more Discovery News video here.
"We want to use this to sequence (the DNA from) museum specimens and therefore help to understand the evolution of species by using museum collections that date back several hundred years," Schuster said.
Indeed, the technique could be used to measure the DNA from specimens collected by such naturalists as Charles Darwin, Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Linnaeus.
