Tracking the Woolly Mammoth

It turns out that the Siberian woolly mammoth wasn't really Siberian. In research published in Current Biology, scientists looked at mitochondrial DNA from 160 mammoth samples from across Eurasia and North America and found that at some point in the past 150,000 years, North American mammoths migrated back to Siberia over the Bering Strait. When the mammoth finally went extinct in Siberia about 10,000 years ago, it was not of Siberian lineage, reports the New York Times.

Another article in SciAm tracks the process of two paleontologists drilling for mammoth DNA — and clues to their ancient genetics — in ice sediment from the Klondike region of Alaska.