The week’s episode of CBC Quirks & Quarks has a segment on the sequencing of the full genome of the Woolly Mammoth.  Dr. Hendrik Poinar, and evolutionary geneticist and Directory of the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and colleagues extracted DNA from two mammoths, one is 45,000 years old and the other one is 4,000 years old.  The original paper appeared in Current Biology.

The giant, hairy elephants that used to roam the grasslands of the Arctic have been extinct for thousands of years, but thanks to DNA preserved in permafrost, the genome of the Woolly Mammoth lives again.

Dr. Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist and Director of the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster University in Hamilton, and colleagues extracted DNA from the remains of two mammoths, one 45,000 years old, and one only 4000 years old.

Careful analysis of the DNA has allowed them to understand how mammoth populations waxed and waned through history, before their ultimate extinction.  Dr. Poinar suggests that having the genetic sequence does mean, at least in theory, that bringing the mammoth back could be possible.

There is another interesting segment on the Supervolcano at Yellowstone.  This story covers a paper that is in this week’s Science.