A team of scientists is extremely close to a new scientific breakthrough, as its members managed to reconstruct close to two-thirds of the wooly mammoth’s genome. The research is being conducted by the scientists at Pen State University and the discovery was made through a carefull analysis of two balls of hair from the giant animals, coming up with the best results ever reached until now for an investigation involving an extinct species.

Mammoths disappeared more than 10,000 years ago, being hunted to extinction by prehistoric humans. Still, there are many other factors that might have led to their dissappearance and the study might shine some light on all these unknown aspects. “You have to ask: How can a species that made it through so many ice ages suddenly go extinct?” said Stephan Schuster, a Penn State University biochemistry professor and co-author of the research, adding that “It seemed that the genetic outfit of that mammoth did not have enough ‘plasticity’ anymore for it to deal with challenges coming from the environment.”

Many are already considering the possibility of bringing the animals back to life, but there is still a lot of work to be done and the process might reach a dead end at any point.

One of the hair samples used in the research was taken from a 20,000 year old mammoth from Siberia, while the other belonged to a specimen that died about 65,000 years ago.  

"This really is the first time that we have been able to study an extinct animal in the same detail as the ones living in our own time," explained Mr. Schuster.

The first round of tests shows that mammoths and elephants only differed by 0.6 percent of their DNA, which equals to about half of the difference between human beings and chimpanzees.Elephants evolved in a tropical habitat and the species can only be found today in very warm places. Their biggest problem is to disperse the great amount of heat generated by their massive bodies. Woolly mammoths are thought to have moved into the Arctic area about 2 million years ago and their biggest problem was to conserve their body heat, which is exactly the opposite.

The results reached so far are presented in the journal Science but the work will continue, as the scenario of bringing back to life such an animal would represent a great starting point for many other investigations and scientific directions, as there are hundreds of species lost over time that would represent a great joy and learning material for many, if they were to be brought back. For now, the procedure is not possible, as the technology advancement still demands several updates. In order make it work, an elephant cell would have to be retrofitted with hundreds of thousands of mammoth-making mutations or the nucleus of a mammoth cell would have to be built from scratch, and for the moment both procedures are impossible.