Ancient mastodon tooth clarifies elephant lineage
“An international team headed by European scientists has been able to clarify the lineage of modern elephants, thanks to improved techniques for extracting DNA from a tooth, dated between 50 000 and 130 000 thousand years old. In a new paper in the open access journal PLoS, Michael Hofreiter from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and colleagues from Switzerland and the United States, described the sequencing of the complete mitochondrial genome of an extinct relative of living elephants, the mastodon (Mamut americanum), which diverged around 26 million years ago.” - European Research Headlines
Tags: DNA, Germany, Mastodon, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Michael Hofreiter, Science, Switzerland, United States
