Schuster and Miller, working at Penn State's Center for Comparative Genomics and Bioinformatics, and Gilbert, from the Center for Ancient Genetics at the University of Copenhagen, led a team of collaborators that includes a large group of researchers and museum curators from the United States, Russia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
This team obtained 10 woolly mammoths' hair.But before this, only seven mitochondrial genomes from extinct animals had been published: four from ancient birds, two from mammoths and one from a mastodon.
A mitochondrial genome is a genetic material of the mitochondria.DNA from bones and muscles is usually contaminated with the DNA from other sources thus limiting it's usefulness in scientific studies.This reason drives them to extract the genetic material from the hair of the organism.
Several of the hair samples investigated were up to 50,000 years old. One of the samples came from the first specimen ever recorded: the so-called Adams mammoth, found in 1799 and dug out of the permafrost between1804 and 1806 by the botanist Michael Adams and members of the Tungus tribe.
-David Nimrod Ude N. Navalta
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