52,000-Year-Old Mammoth ‘Beef Jerky’ Reveals Exquisitely Preserved Chromosomes

A crack team of scientists has made a remarkable discovery in the small molecules of a giant creature: immaculately preserved genome architecture in the 52,000-year-old remains of a woolly mammoth. The desiccated skin is so well preserved that it contains intact mammoth chromosomes, giving the researchers an unprecedented look into the ancient animal’s biology.

The last mammoths went extinct 4,000 years ago, recent enough that some of the pyramids were already built in Egypt. For this study, however, the team investigated mammoth samples that date back 52,000 years and 39,000 years, respectively, at which point anatomically modern humans still shared the planet with Neanderthals.

Mammoth remains are found across the steppe on which they once roamed. The hairy proboscideans’ remains are often preserved in permafrost—permanently frozen topsoil—though phases of thawing and refreezing can damage the microscopic structures in the animals’ soft tissue. Sometimes, the preservation is stunning. In 2022, for example, an immaculately preserved mammoth calf was found in a Yukon gold mine. But the recent discovery revealed preservation on an entirely different scale: a molecular one. The team’s research was published today in Cell.

“We looked around, we dug down, and as we finally zoomed in, we could see that we were in the presence of a new kind of fossil,” said study co-author Erez Lieberman Aiden, a computer scientist and geneticist affiliated with Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, in a press conference last Tuesday.

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