Woolly mammoths weren't always the shaggy beasts depicted in books and movies. And now, scientists have a better idea of when these behemoths evolved some of their most iconic traits.
Researchers from Sweden compared the genomes of 23 Siberian woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) to the genomes of 28 modern-day Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) and African elephants (Loxodonta). They found that over the course of the megafauna's more than 700,000 years of existence, its "trademark features" — such as woolly fur, small ears and large fat deposits — evolved too, according to a study published April 7 in the journal Current Biology(opens in new tab).
"We wanted to know what makes a mammoth a woolly mammoth," lead author David Díez del Molino(opens in new tab), a paleontologist at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, said in a statement. "Woolly mammoths have some very characteristic morphological features, like their thick fur and small ears, that you obviously expect based on what frozen specimens look like, but there are also many other adaptations, like fat metabolism and cold perception, that are not so evident because they're at the molecular level."
