Scientists who pulled DNA from the hair shafts of 13 Siberian woolly mammoths say it may be possible to mine museums for genetic information about ancient and even extinct species.
This 25,000 year old mammoth hair had been sitting in a museum drawer for years before scientists extracted its DNA
They sequenced a DNA sample taken from mammoth hair that had been "in somebody's drawer for 200 years", and one that was at least 50,000 years old, the international team of researchers says.
Now they are asking for samples of hair, feathers and even horn from museum specimens to see what they can learn from some of these ageing items.
"For me the whole study is about extinction. How is it that large mammals go extinct?" says Webb Miller, a biology professor and genomics researcher at
Pennsylvania State University.
Studying the genetic material of animals could offer clues about tiny differences that helped one species survive while another perished, Miller says.
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