Siberian | Pakistan

Scientists have recovered the oldest-known RNA, a molecule necessary for most biological functions, from a woolly mammoth that inhabited Siberia about 39,000 years ago, showing it can last longer than previously known and promising a new path for studying organisms that lived long ago. The RNA, successfully isolated and sequenced, was extracted from muscle tissue in the left front leg of a juvenile male mammoth, perhaps five to 10 years old, whose carcass was discovered in 2010 in the Siberian permafrost in the Russian Far East along the Oyogos Yar coast bordering the Laptev Sea. The mammoth, given the name Yuka, represents one of the best-preserved frozen carcasses of this extinct species. Its RNA, among other things, revealed which genes had been “turned on” in Yuka’s tissue around the time of death, showing signs of cell stress. Most knowledge about prehistoric organisms comes from studying skeletal fossils, but there is a limit to what these can reveal about their biology. The growing ability to recover t...