Scientists pull ancient RNA from a wooly mammoth's body
toggle caption Valerii V Plotnikov
It was 2012 when Love Dalén , a paleogeneticist at Stockholm University, first laid eyes upon a special specimen on a lab table in eastern Siberia.
"Our Russian collaborators said, 'Come here into this room,'" he recalls. "We walked in and there's this dead mammoth lying there. It doesn't look like it died yesterday, but you can't believe your eyes because it's so well preserved. It's a kind of holy hell moment when you see this."
The animal had been found thawing out of a permafrost cliff near the Siberian coastline — not quite the entire body of a juvenile mammoth that lived during the last Ice Age some 39,000 years ago.
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It had remained buried and frozen for millennia. Now, in a paper published in the journal Cell, Dalén and his colleagues report that they managed to extract something remarkable from that ancient mammoth — RNA, the molecule that translates genes into proteins and which tends to degrade rapidly.
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