Scientists have long wondered if the wooly mammoth went extinct due to high levels of inbreeding.
In science, we usually share our successes and ignore the less glamorous mishaps. We decided to follow a different approach. This is the story of how multiple generations of scientists collaborated to decipher the genome of the mammoth formerly known as Lonely Boy, often referred to as the last mammoth on the Earth.
Inbreeding can cause lots of issues. Portraits of Charles II of Spain, last monarch of the Habsburg house, show his deformed chin due to generations of inbreeding. Scientists have long wondered whether genomic processes led to the extinction of the mammoths on Wrangel Island. Although this is common practice in the field of ancient DNA, it also comes with the trade-off that some of the mammoth DNA will also inadvertently be destroyed. In our case, it meant that not enough mammoth material was left in the sample to generate a high-quality genome.
But even after all these steps, Lonely Boy still looked like an outlier. At this point, we decided to re-date the sample. Lonely Boy had been dated a long time ago and methods have considerably improved since then.
Extinction Genomics Ice Age Woolly Mammoth
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