If the Genes Fit
To home in on what makes woolly mammoths so unique, scientists played a highly complex game of compare and contrast. Geneticist Vincent Lynch and his team first sequenced the genomes of three modern-day Asian elephants — the closest living relatives to mammoths — and two woolly mammoths that died roughly 20,000 to 60,000 years ago. Then, they compared genomes from the two species to find genetic variations that were unique to mammoths.
Scientists identified roughly 1.4 million genetic variants that were unique to woolly mammoths, and these variants caused changes to the proteins produced by roughly 1,600 different genes — different proteins means different physical and biochemical features.