Hair Untangles Woolly Mammoth Puzzle

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Drawing of a woolly mammoth. Credit: Penn State University
Drawing of a woolly mammoth. Credit: Penn State University

Stephan C. Schuster and Webb Miller of Penn State University, working with Thomas Gilbert from Copenhagen and a large international consortium, discovered that hair shafts provide an ideal source of ancient DNA -- a better source than bones and muscle for studying the genome sequences of extinct animals. Their research achievement, described in a paper to be published in the journal Science on 28 September 2007, includes the sequencing of entire mitochondrial genomes from 10 individual woolly mammoths.


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