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Alaska's first full mammoth skeleton may be lurking under Arctic lake. When an aquatic ecologist was surveying shallow lakes in Northwest Alaska three years ago, she and the pilot who traveled with her came upon an unusual sight in the treeless Arctic region: a pair of terns that kept flying around and perching on what appeared to be a log sticking out of a muddy area. The protruding object, it turns out, was no log. It was the large and well-preserved leg bone of a woolly mammoth. Right by it was another bone, perfectly articulated, that was clearly from the...

Paleontologists are calling a recent find in the Russian region of Yakutia a “sensation.” Last September, Aleksandr Banderov and his hunting party were traveling near the Semyulyakh River when they uncovered the preserved carcass of an adolescent wholly rhinoceros, a species that roamed the frozen landscapes of Europe and northern Asia during the last Ice Age. The hunters initially thought it was a reindeer frozen in the ice, but quickly realized it was something much older. “We were sailing past a ravine and noticed hair hanging on the top of it,’ Alexander told The Siberian Times. “At first we thought...

Researchers from Harvard University have successfully inserted genes from a woolly mammoth into living cells from an Asian elephant, the extinct giant's closest remaining relative. Harvard geneticist George Church used DNA from Arctic permafrost woolly mammoth samples to copy 14 mammoth genes -- emphasizing those related to its chilly lifestyle. "We prioritized genes associated with cold resistance including hairiness, ear size, subcutaneous fat and, especially, hemoglobin," Church told The Sunday Times. Then, using a kind of DNA cut/paste system called CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat), Church dropped the genes into Asian elephant skin cells. The result? A petri...

A group of Russian and South Korean researchers has begun their attempt to clone a woolly mammoth, starting by extracting DNA from a spectacularly well-preserved specimen discovered in the Siberian permafrot in 2013. The project is led by Hwang Woo-Suk, a Korean cloning scientist who was the focus of a scandal in 2006 involving fraudulent research on human stem cells. Hwang has had success with animals, however, reportedly creating the world's first cloned dog and several cloned coyotes.

Recent scientific findings date their arrival earlier than ever thought, sparking hot debate among archaeologists For much of its length, the slow-moving Aucilla River in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first Americans.For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse.Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Florida Museum of...

They're probably about half as old as scientists once thought they were. But a pair of butchered bones found in a cave near the Alaska-Yukon border are "definite" evidence of human presence in North America just after the end of the last Ice Age, perhaps as much as 14,000 years ago, according to a new study. The bones were originally discovered in the late 1970s by Canadian archaeologist Dr. Jacques Cinq-Mars at a site known as Bluefish Caves, high in northwestern Yukon Territory. In one of the caves, dubbed Cave 2, archaeologists found more than 18,000 fragments of bones from...

Indian DNA links to 6 'founding mothers' By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer NEW YORK - Nearly all of today's Native Americans in North, Central and South America can trace part of their ancestry to six women whose descendants immigrated around 20,000 years ago, a DNA study suggests. Those women left a particular DNA legacy that persists to today in about 95 percent of Native Americans, researchers said. The finding does not mean that only these six women gave rise to the migrants who crossed into North America from Asia in the initial populating of the continent, said study co-author...

One of the things that came up in the many comments appended to the article on Bob's painting of extinct Maltese animals was the famous Egyptian tomb painting of the 'pygmy mammoth'. You're likely already familiar with this (now well known) case: here's the image, as it appears on the beautifully decorated tomb wall of Rekhmire, 'Governor of the Town' of Thebes, and vizier of Egypt during the reigns of Tuthmose III and Amenhotep II (c. 1479 to 1401 BCE) during the XVIII dynasty... In 1994, Baruch Rosen published a brief article in Nature in which he drew attention to...

Scientists Aim to Revive the Woolly Mammoth Scientists with the Mammoth Creation Project hope to find a frozen woolly mammoth specimen with sperm DNA. The sperm DNA would then be injected into a female elephant; by repeating the procedure with offspring, a creature 88 percent mammoth could be produced within fifty years. "This is possible with modern technology we already have," said Akira Iritani, who is chairman of the genetic engineering department at Kinki University in Japan and a member of the Mammoth Creation Project. However, the DNA in mammoth remains found to date has been unusable, damaged by time...

The cave is cool and damp -- prefect for preserving prehistoric remains, Meachen says. "It's like a refrigerator in there, and probably has been for 20,000 years," she said. "Some of the bones we're finding there have collagen in them. That is where you could get the ancient DNA." The scientists saw bones falling out of a part of the cave, and decided to start digging there. "That was the fossil layer," she said. "There is so much to dig. We have two more years for funding that we can be out there, so we are going to try to...

(Reuters) - Scientists excavating an ancient Wyoming sinkhole containing a rare trove of fossils of Ice Age mammals have unearthed hundreds of bones of such prehistoric animals as American cheetahs, a paleontologist said on Friday. The two-week dig by an international team of researchers led by Des Moines University paleontologist Julie Meachen marked the first exploration of Natural Trap Cave at the base of the Bighorn Mountains in north-central Wyoming since its initial discovery in the 1970s. Meachen said the extensive excavation that began late last month uncovered roughly 200 large bones of animals like horses that roamed North America...

For the first time in three decades, paleontologists are about to revisit one of North America's most remarkable troves of ancient fossils: The bones of tens of thousands of animals piled at the bottom of a sinkhole-type cave. Natural Trap Cave in Wyoming is 85 feet (25 meters) deep and almost impossible to see until you're standing right next to it. Over tens of thousands of years, many, many animals—including now-extinct mammoths, short-faced bears, American lions and American cheetahs—shared the misfortune of not noticing the 15-foot-wide (4 meters) opening until they were plunging to their deaths. Now, the U.S. Bureau...

Bringing extinct animals back to life is really happening — and it’s going to be very, very cool. Unless it ends up being very, very bad. The first time Ben Novak saw a passenger pigeon, he fell to his knees and remained in that position, speechless, for 20 minutes. He was 16. At 13, Novak vowed to devote his life to resurrecting extinct animals. At 14, he saw a photograph of a passenger pigeon in an Audubon Society book and “fell in love.” But he didn’t know that the Science Museum of Minnesota, which he was then visiting with a...

News in Science 18/4/2003 Ancient dung reveals a picture of the past [This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s833847.htm] An arctic mound of soil covering a core of solid ice in northeastern Siberia (Pic: Science) The successful dating of the most ancient genetic material yet may allow scientists to use preserved DNA from sources such as mammoth dung to help paint a picture of past environments. An international research effort led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark reports in today?s issue of the journal Science it has extracted well preserved animal and plant DNA from...

Mammoth herds 'roamed fertile Bering Strait in Ice Age' Huge herds of mammoth, wild horses and bison once roamed the land bridge between North America and Siberia, new evidence suggests. Plant fossils have shown that 24,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, dry grassland covered much of region. The vegetation would have allowed large populations of mammals to survive all year round on the now-submerged landmass known as Beringia or the Bering Strait. Scientists writing in the journal Nature said the animals would have been sustained by a diet rich in prairie sage, bunch grasses, and other grass-like plants....

REGULAR meals of mammoth meat helped some early human tribes to expand more quickly than their largely vegetarian contemporaries, according to a genetic study. Human populations in east Asia about 30,000 years ago developed at dramatically different rates, following a pattern that appears to reflect the availability of mammoths and other large game. In the part of the region covering what is now northern China, Mongolia and southern Siberia, vast plains teemed with mammals such as mammoths, mastodons and woolly rhinoceroses and the number of early human beings grew between 34,000 and 20,000 years ago. Further south, where the terrain...

Mammoth skeleton found in Siberia By James Rodgers BBC News, Moscow It is rare to find mammoth remains in such good condition Fishermen in Siberia have discovered the complete skeleton of a mammoth - a find which Russian experts have described as very rare. The remains appeared when flood waters receded in Russia's Krasnoyarsk region. The mammoth's backbone, skull, teeth and tusks all survived intact. It appears to have died aged about 50. Mammoths lived in Africa, Europe, Asia and North America between about 1.6 million years ago and 10,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene epoch. Alexander Kerzhayev, deputy director...

Woolly mammoths are coming back, say cloning scientists In what sounds like it could be the plot for the next Jurassic Park movie, a team of scientists in Siberia says there's a 'high chance' that they will be able to clone a woolly mammoth. The breakthrough comes as a result of last year's discovery of an incredibly well-preserved mammoth carcass, frozen in the permafrost of Siberia's Malolyakhovskiy island. The scientists estimate that the animal is about 43,000 years old, and was 50-60 years old when it died in distress after getting stuck in the ice. In the ten months since...

Researchers have found evidence to suggest that climate change, rather than humans, was the main factor that drove the woolly mammoth to extinction. A DNA analysis shows that the number of creatures began to decrease much earlier than previously thought as the world's climate changed. It also shows that there was a distinct population of mammoth in Europe that died out around 30,000 years ago. The results have published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The view many researchers had about woolly mammoths is that they were a hardy, abundant species that thrived during their time on the...

t is unlikely that a mammoth could be cloned in the way we created Dolly the sheep, as has been proposed following the discovery of mammoth bones in northern Siberia. However, the idea prompts us to consider the feasibility of other avenues. Even if the Dolly method is not possible, there are other ways in which it would be biologically interesting to work with viable mammoth cells if they can be found. In order for a Dolly-like clone to be born it is necessary to have females of a closely related species to provide unfertilised eggs, and, if cloned embryos...