Humans, Chimps and now Mammoths?

The complicated search for well preserved DNA in fossils has recently advanced with the sequencing of 13 million base pairs of endogenous genetic material from a female mammoth jaw bone discovered on the Taimyr Peninsula of the Russian Federation. This is greater than the 27,000 base pairs recently sequenced from the extinct cave bear. Mammoths share 98.55% of the same genetic material with living elephants, which validates the 5 million year divergence time between the two species. Large scale sequencing of "fossil" DNA will bring about new perspectives of these interesting creatures, and may lead to the cloning of mammoths in the near future.


Poinar, Hendrik N., Schwarz, Carsten, Qi, Ji, Shapiro, Beth, MacPhee, Ross D. E., Buigues, Bernard, Tikhonov, Alexei, Huson, Daniel H., Tomsho, Lynn P., Auch, Alexander, Rampp, Markus, Miller, Webb, Schuster, Stephan C. (2006).
Metagenomics to Paleogenomics: Large-Scale Sequencing of Mammoth DNA
Science 2006 311: 392-394