Scientists have unveiled the oldest woolly mammoth specimen ever discovered in North America as part of a major DNA study spanning a million years of mammoth evolution.
Researchers have discovered the oldest-known wooly mammoth fossil in North America and uncovered its genetic secrets, according to a new study. The 216,000-year-old tooth, found along the Old Crow River in the Yukon territory in Canada, confirms that wooly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) arrived in North America at least 100,000 years earlier than scientists initially thought. Study lead author Camilo Chacón-Duque , a researcher at the Centre for Palaeogenetics at Stockholm University in Sweden, told Live Science in an email that the find was unusual because most North American mammoth specimens of this age likely belong to other species that existed before wooly mammoths. "To our knowledge, the Old Crow mammoth is the oldest North American mammoth fossil that can be morphologically identified with confidence as a woolly mammoth," Chacón-Duque said. The researchers extracted DNA from the Old Crow mammoth as part of an extensive study of mammoth genetics. In the study, the researchers revealed "long-lost" genetic diversity from different mammoth lineages across more than a million years of their evolutionary history, according to a statement from Stockholm University. The Old Crow mammoth's DNA was in the oldest group of samples in the analysis, described as "deep-time DNA," but it wasn't the oldest. The oldest DNA, from Russia, was around 1.3 million years old. The researchers published their findings online April 9 in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution . Related: 130,000-year-old mammoth calf smells like 'fermented earth and flesh,' necropsy reveals Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now Get the world's most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors The ancestors of mammoths evolved in tropical Africa and were closely related to living elephants. These ancestors then began moving into the…