Up until now, our dreams of sequencing woolly mammoth DNA were little more than idle fantasies. What remains we had, mostly of beasts frozen in the tundra, were fairly contaminated.
Well, all that's changed with a new report published in Science. A team led by Stephan C. Schuster of Penn State University has discovered that woolly mammoth hair is an excellent source of DNA samples. Rather than being useless and dead, hair cells are in fact nicely protected by keratin, a hard covering that one scientist describes as "a kind of biological plastic."
Schuster said, "This discovery is good news for anyone interested in learning more about how species of large mammals can go extinct." But just to bum us out, he added that the possibility of cloning our furry friends back from extinction "is just science fiction."
It's only fiction until it's real, pal.
That mess is partially frozen mammoth remains, complete with muscle tissue and hair. Not quite as snuggly as a snuffalufagus, is it? (Credit: Mammuthus lab Khatanga/Tom Gilbert)
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