DNA of Woolly Mammoth Fully Sequenced

jd writes "Scientists have decoded the mitochondrial DNA of the Woolly Mammoth. According to the article: 'the Mammoth was most closely related to the Asian elephant rather than the African Elephant. The three groups split from a common ancestor about six million years ago, with Asian elephants and mammoths diverging about half a million years later.' This work is tied into efforts by researchers to use DNA to analyze other extinct species, such as the cave bear, the Haast eagle and the American lion. The novel aspect of this latest work is that it involved stitching together almost 50 fragments of mtDNA in order to obtain the sequence as a whole."

Comments

Re:Embryos

[Caydel]

I was reading about that this morning. It would take apparently nearly 50 years to get an 88% mammoth if they could do this. Problem is, they have not found any wolly mammoth sperm from which they could obtain the needed DNA.

Re:Incorrect title (again)

[FalconZero]

For comparison (in humans) the mitochondrial DNA comprises approximatly 16,500 base pairs to the Neucler DNA's 3 billion. At that rate the Mitochondrial DNA is equal to ~0.00055% the ammount of Neuclear DNA.

Re:Mammoths evolve? wait a sec...

[AlexMax2742]

A portion of the creationists (I use this henceforth to refer to everyone who beleives in some sort of ID nonsense) came up with "Micro" and "Macro" evolution to compensate for this. According to those who beleive it (It's hard to tie it into Creationism itself, because I dont think even two different Creationists agree on what happened), evolution DOES happen on a very small scale, like changing charactoristics in fruit flies, or a mutating virus, but that it's impossible for evolution to change things to the point of there being two totally different species. Of course, such a thing would take a long time to happen in real evolution, which is why their faulty logic is firmly cemented, they can't be proven wrong with a simple explination of "We've seen it happen".