RNA is supposed to fall apart within hours, yet researchers have now read it from a mammoth frozen in Siberian permafrost 39,000 years ago — and the transcripts caught his muscle tissue in the middle of a stress response

Space Daily has an interesting story about researchers reading 39,000 year old RNA from a frozen in Siberian mammoth. Yuka, a juvenile woolly mammoth recovered from Siberian permafrost was one of ten permafrost-preserved mammoths sample in the study, which was published in the journal Cell in November 2025.

RNA is the molecule biologists generally treat as disposable. Unlike DNA, which is built to be a stable long-term archive, RNA is manufactured, used, and broken down by a cell within hours, sometimes minutes, as part of ordinary business: turning genetic instructions into proteins, then discarding the messenger once the job is done. Outside a living cell, without anything actively protecting it, most RNA is expected to degrade within hours to days. That is the baseline assumption researchers have worked from for decades.

A team led by Emilio Mármol Sánchez, now at the University of Copenhagen’s Globe Institute, working with Love Dalén at Stockholm University’s Centre for Palaeogenetics and colleagues including Marc Friedländer and Bastian Fromm, has now recovered and sequenced RNA from muscle tissue belonging to a woolly mammoth frozen in Siberian permafrost for roughly 39,000 years. The work was published in Cell in November 2025.