MOSCOW, August 9. /TASS/. A team of researchers from Russia’s Siberian Federal University and Southern Federal University have uncovered that a mammoth, whose remains were found on the Maly Lyakhovsky Island (part of the New Siberian Islands archipelago in Russia’s Yakutia Region) in 2012, was closely related to mammoths who inhabited Eastern Siberia and Alaska at about the same time, Researcher at Siberian Federal University’s Forest Genomics Laboratory and one of the group’s members Natalya Oreshkova told TASS.
“We found out that ours was a woolly mammoth, closely related to mammoths who inhabited Eastern Siberia and Alaska – which formed a single piece of land called Beringia back then – at about the same time,” she said. “Besides, the remains of mammoths from this phylogenetic group were also found in European Russia,” Oreshkova noted. According to her, this group of mammoths descended from a common ancestor 172,000 to 342,000 years ago.
Tusk collectors unearthed the remains of an adult mammoth, which was named the Malolyakhovsky mammoth after the place where he was found, in mid-August 2012. It turned out that not only had the animal’s bones been preserved but so had some of his soft tissues and even his trunk. What ’s more, the trunk is currently the world’s only preserved trunk of a grown-up mammoth.
Researchers at Siberian Federal University’s Forest Genomics Laboratory were expected to try to decode the Malolyakhovsky mammoth’s genome and identify the animal’s origin and closest relatives. They managed to collect some biological samples, including fragments of a rib and arm bone, as well as a piece of skin.
“Unfortunately, because the ancient DNA is heavily fragmented and poorly preserved, we failed to perform a sequence analysis and assemble the Malolyakhovsky mammoth’s nuclear genome,” Oreshkova pointed out. “However, together with researchers from Southern Federal University, we managed to assemble the mammoth’s entire mitochondrial genome,” she said, adding that the acquired data had been compared to the genomes of other mammoths from the GenBank database, which contains DNA and RNA sequences for more than 300,000 organisms.
According to Oreshkova, tests were conducted in two laboratories – Siberian Federal University’s Laboratory of Forest Genomics and Southern Federal University’s Laboratory for the Identification of Objects of Biological Origin. The research findings have been published in the Mitochondrial DNA Part B: Resources journal.