What do mammoths and elephants have in common

The findings should be weighed cautiously, some scientists warn, because looking only at mitochondrial DNA can be misleading.

Strands of DNA in the cell nucleus are millions of times longer than those in the mitochondrion, so the project may take a couple of years.

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David Reich of the Broad Institute and Harvard helped lead the consortium that has just published its findings — the most sweeping analysis yet of elephants and their extinct relatives — in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He says the findings show that elephant species have often mixed and mingled over the millennia.

But also that current elephants in Africa have been isolated for so long that they should be considered two separate species, which could affect conservation efforts. This study started as the Elephant Genome Project more than a decade ago. We sequenced a high-quality genome of the iconic elephants — the savanna and African elephant — and it took us a long time to publish it. We decided eventually to publish it by not just presenting the genome of the elephant, but also presenting the genomes of all diverse living elephants, and also diverse extinct elephants from which we obtained ancient DNA.

This study ended up being a big ancient DNA study as well, where we report the first ancient DNA from the extinct Mastodon, which is a distant cousin of the elephant. Also, ancient DNA from the first Columbian elephants, which are an American temperate mammoth; and also a very high-quality genome of an ancient European straight-tusked elephant that was more than , years old.

So it was really an amazing set of data, and we were able to analyze it to obtain a qualitatively different picture of elephant population history than we had before. The biggest take-home message is really that mixture of very different elephant populations occurred repeatedly over elephant history. Before this work, I was involved in studies that took the very thin data we had and worked out the average relationships amongst elephants, figured out which groups were closest to which other groups.

But with this high-resolution, whole-genome data, we can figure out that great mixture events have occurred in the past. Mammoth-like creatures could help restore this ecosystem by trampling shrubs, knocking over trees, and fertilising grasses with their faeces.

Theoretically, this could help reduce climate change. If the current Siberian permafrost melts, it will release potent greenhouse gases. Compared to tundra, grassland might reflect more light and keep the ground cooler , which Colossal hopes will prevent the permafrost from melting. While the prospect of reviving extinct species has long been discussed by groups such as Revive and Restore , advances in genome editing have now brought such dreams close to reality.

But just because we have the tools to resurrect mammoth-like creatures, does this mean we should? De-extinction is a controversial field. A common worry is that bringing back extinct species, whose ecological niches may no longer exist, will upset existing ecosystems. But when it comes to mammophants, this critique lacks bite. Colossal says it aims to recreate the steppe ecosystem a large, flat grassland that flourished in Siberia until about 12, years ago.

Reintroducing species can transform ecosystems for the better. A well-known example is the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the s, which started a cascade of positive changes for local flora and fauna. Mammophants may do the same.