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The woolly mammoth could roam the Earth once again. That’s the goal of Colossal Biosciences as the biotech company announced a major breakthrough Wednesday in its mission to revive the 6-ton, 16-foot animal back from extinction. The Dallas-based company said it has created a set of stem cells from an Asian elephant in hopes of bringing back a creature that would be eerily similar to the woolly mammoth, according to reports. “This is probably the most significant step in the early stages of this project,” said geneticist and company co-founder George Church, a Harvard University professor, according to NPR. The...

An adult mastodon tooth that was spotted at Rio Del Mar Beach near Aptos Creek is now in the hands of paleontologists in Santa Cruz. The foot-long tooth was found by Jennifer Schuh while walking the beach on Friday. Not knowing what it was, she snapped a few photos, posted them on social media and left it on the sand. That caught the attention of paleontologist Wayne Thompson at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. "He called me and told me what it was and I rushed back, but it was gone. I was crushed," Schuh said. "I knew...

Based on sites excavated in the western United States, archaeologists know Paleo-American Clovis hunter-gatherers who lived around the time of the extinctions at least occasionally [emphasis added] killed or scavenged Ice Age megafauna such as mammoths. There they've found preserved bones of megafauna together with the stone tools used for killing and butchering these animals...Unfortunately, many areas in the Southeastern United States lack sites with preserved bone and associated stone tools that might indicate whether megafauna were hunted there by Clovis or other Paleo-American cultures. Without evidence of preserved bones of megafauna, archaeologists have to find other ways to examine...

Paleontologists are busy this Memorial Day weekend trying to find a tooth in Santa Cruz County that dates back to the Ice Ages. An unknown beach-goer picked up a giant mastodon tooth that first surfaced on an Aptos beach Friday. Now scientists are hoping that the scientifically significant tooth will be returned to the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History where it can be studied and displayed for the public as a piece of ancient history. US Census breakdown: The largest racial group in each Bay Area county The 1-foot-long tooth was originally spotted by a beach-goer strolling through the...

Kap København Formation Two Million Years Ago Reconstruction of Kap København formation two million years ago in a time when the temperature was SIGNIFICANTLY WARMER than northernmost Greenland today. Credit: Beth Zaikenjpg ******************************************************************************** A ‘game-changing’ new chapter in the history of evolution has been opened after two-million-year-old DNA has been identified for the first time. Researchers discovered microscopic fragments of environmental DNA in Ice Age sediment in northern Greenland. Using cutting-edge technology, they found that the fragments are one million years older than the previous record for DNA, which was sampled from a Siberian mammoth bone. “For the first time...

Scientists discovered the oldest known DNA and used it to reveal what life was like 2 million years ago in the northern tip of Greenland...With animal fossils hard to come by, the researchers extracted environmental DNA, also known as eDNA, from soil samples..."I wouldn't have, in a million years, expected to find mastodons in northern Greenland," said Love Dalen, a researcher in evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University...

Researchers from the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) have identified the remains of a mammoth in the town of Los Reyes de Juárez, Mexico.The mammoth was uncovered in one of the towns municipal cemeteries whilst workers were preparing new graves.Upon further inspection, biologist Iván Alarcón Durán identified that they were the bones of megafauna from the Pleistocene, with initial studies suggesting the remains are an elderly male Columbian mammoth.The Columbian mammoth (mammuthus columbi) inhabited North America as far north as the northern United States and as far south as Costa Rica during the Pleistocene epoch. DNA studies shows...

Researchers with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) found and extracted a mammoth tusk deep under the ocean. According to MBARI, their team spotted the tusk 185 miles offshore and 10,000 feet deep on top of a seamount in 2019. They returned on July 2021 to bring the tusk to the surface. "The researchers have confirmed that the tusk—about one meter (just over three feet) in length—is from a Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi)," reported the institute. They believe it could be the oldest well-preserved mammoth tusk recovered from this area of North America. The Columbian mammoth went extinct around 11,500...

Previous studies had indicated that while most mammoths likely died out around 10,000 years ago, a few had managed to survive in small populations on remote islands off the coast of Siberia. There had even been suggestions that some of these isolated island populations had held on until around 4,000 years ago. Now though, the results of a ten-year study involving the collection and analysis of 535 samples of sediment and permafrost from Siberia, Canada, Alaska and Scandinavia have yielded evidence to suggest that mammoths had still been roaming the wilds of mainland Siberia as recently as 3,900 years ago....

Researchers discovered four charred seeds of a wild tobacco plant within the hearth contents, along with stone tools and duck bones left over from meals. Until now, the earliest documented use of tobacco came in the form of nicotine residue found inside a smoking pipe from Alabama dating to 3,300 years ago. The researchers believe the nomadic hunter-gatherers at the Utah site may have smoked the tobacco or perhaps sucked wads of tobacco plant fiber for the stimulant qualities offered by the nicotine it contained. After tobacco use originated among the New World's native peoples, it spread worldwide following the...

It started with a petrified tree, half-buried in the mud of the Mokelumne River watershed in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The site intrigued Greg Francek, a ranger for East Bay Municipal Utility District, as he was walking the valley last summer. He inspected further, and what he recently discovered led to one of the most significant fossil discoveries in California history. Advertisement "I looked around the area further and I found a second tree," Francek said in an EBMUD statement released this week, documenting the discovery. "And then a third and so on. After finding dozens of trees I realized...

That’s a rare find in Florida! A giant bone of a Mammoth dating back to the Ice Age was just found in the Peace River near Arcadia this week. The 4-foot, 50-pound bone is well over 10,000 years old! For two Florida scuba divers, ancient history resurfaced when they discovered a 4-foot, 50-pound mammoth bone dating back to the ice age. Derek Demeter and Henry Sadler, both avid explorers and amateur paleontologists, made their big discovery when diving in the dark waters of the Peace River near Arcadia on April 25. “[Henry] came up, and he’s like, ‘Derek, I found...

Scientists have identified the largest ever assemblage of mammoth bones. team of scientists has discovered the largest collection to date of mammoth skeletons in one place, just outside Mexico City. The researchers have counted more than 200 individual mammoths to date—and believe there are still more to discover. In 2018, the government announced the development of a new Mexico City airport at the Santa Lucía Air Force Base, north of the city. People have found mammoth remains in the northern part of the city and the wider region since the 1970s. So, Pedro Francisco Sánchez Nava, the national coordinator of...

The 13,000-year-old partial tusk of an adult mammoth found in western Siberia has four images of two-humped camels engraved on it. The artifact, which measures about 70 cm (27.6 inches) in length and 10 cm (3.9 inches) in diameter, is a frontal fragment of a 1.5-m- (59-inch-) long tusk from a 35 to 40-year-old male mammoth... The researchers radiocarbon-dated the artifact to about 13,000 years ago and spotted several incisions on it... "All four animals (labeled as #1, 2, 3 and 4 in the image above) were executed in the same style, using similar techniques and tools... The main stylistic...

Rewilding is not about restoring the past, but about proactively seeking solutions for a world in environmental crisis. There is something deeply heartening about an extinct native species being reintroduced to its former habitat. In the United Kingdom, there are several of those stories. The last time storks were recorded breeding in the UK was way back in 1416 on top of a cathedral in Edinburgh. This year, nests on the Knepp Estate in West Sussex produced the first wild-born chicks in 600 years. The parent birds were bred in captivity and released into the wild as part of a...

A new study by Russian and French researchers found new petroglyphs which helped the answer this conundrum. For example, at Baga-Oygur II was found the image of a long-gone woolly rhino. Most of the image is lost due to a rock slicing, but the animal is quite recognisable with an elongated, squat torso, short powerful legs, a characteristic tail, and an elongated muzzle with exaggeratedly enlarged two horns. This was useful because these animals - like mammoths - became extinct around 15,000 years ago in this region, making the drawings the work of Palaeolithic artists... The scientists also concluded that...

When some people hear “mammoth,” money comes to mind. Local tour companies offer trips to the mammoth graveyards across the region’s Arctic frontier. Prospectors for mammoth parts—especially the tusks, known as ice ivory—have raced to collect remains. Around 100 tons of mammoth tusks are legally mined in Yakutia each year, while illegal mining is estimated at twice that much, according to a report by TASS “If ever a mammoth surfaces somewhere in the world, it will actually have Yakut roots,” said Mr. Fyodorov, proudly underscoring that his republic is mammoth central, the hereditary home of so many of these beasts....

Japanese scientists have awakened the cells of an extinct woolly mammoth in an experiment that could one day bring the prehistoric beasts back to life. Researchers from Kindai University in Osaka extracted bone marrow and muscle tissue from a long-frozen beast and injected it into the ovaries of a mouse, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports. The experiment revived the 28,000-year-old creature’s cells, triggering “signs of biological activity,” according to the researchers. “[It’s] a significant step towards bringing mammoths back from the dead,” Kei Miyamoto, one of the study’s authors, told the Nikkei Asian Review.

Cells from a woolly mammoth that died 28,000 years ago have begun to show "signs of biological [activity]" after they were implanted in mouse cells. However, researchers caution that it's unlikely the extinct creatures will walk the Earth again anytime soon. The research, published in Scientific Reports, details how a well-preserved woolly mammoth, found in 2011 in the Siberian permafrost, has begun to show some activity. "Until now many studies have focused on analyzing fossil DNA and not whether they still function," Miyamoto added. The study's abstract reveals "[i]n the reconstructed oocytes, the mammoth nuclei showed the spindle assembly, histone...

For several million years, the Earth cycled through ice ages at a regular pace, but then, 1.25 million to 700,000 years ago, something changed: ice ages went from lasting 40,000 years to 100,000. … By looking at the microscopic shells of microorganisms called foraminifera, Adam Hasenfratz of the Geological Institute in Zürich, Switzerland, and colleagues, find evidence of a reduction in deep water circulation, causing less carbon dioxide to be released into the air. Oceanic changes in the Antarctic Zone could have ensured “that glacial conditions persisted despite orbital changes to the contrary”, the study says. The new research, presented...