Overballe-Petersen's findings suggest that the time-scale of natural transformation is no longer limited to the short lifespan of long, intact DNA fragments in the environment. To see how far they could theoretically stretch the time frame for natural transformation, the researchers extracted degraded, 43,000-year-old DNA from a woolly mammoth bone. Again, their experiments showed that the modified A. baylyi would plug it into their genomes. “As long as there's any DNA left, there's a possibility for genetic transfer. And as some DNA lasts for thousands of years, we have an extended time frame of what's happening,” said Overballe-Petersen.