Mammoth foot preserved after thousands of years

Accustomed as we are to bones, more or less fossilized, being the typical material for studying extinct animals, this woolly mammoth foot, a beast that became extinct thousands of years ago, is quite a surprise. Under suitable preservation conditions, which can occur by chance in nature if we are lucky, more tissues than just bones can be preserved and in a reasonably good state. To the point of being able to extract a lot of DNA, as has been achieved in a recent study with tissues from a 52,000-year-old woolly mammoth, led by a team comprising, among others, Marcela Sandoval-Velasco, from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and Love Dalén, from the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm in Sweden and the Swedish Museum of Natural History. The study is entitled “Three-dimensional genome architecture persists in a 52,000-year-old woolly mammoth skin sample.” And it has been published in the academic journal Cell. (Source: NCYT by Amazings)

(Photo: Love Dalén. CC BY-NC-SA)