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November 14, 2025<\/p>\n
3 min read<\/p>\n
Oldest RNA in the World Extracted from Frozen Woolly Mammoth<\/p>\n
RNA has been extracted from an ancient woolly mammoth, providing insight into its last moments on Earth<\/p>\n
By Humberto Basilio edited by Andrea Thompson<\/span><\/p>\n The frozen carcass of Yuka is displayed at an exhibition in Yokohama, Japan on July 12, 2013.<\/p>\n KAZUHIRO NOGI\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n In 2010 Yukaghir hunters found the nearly intact carcass of a young woolly mammoth frozen in the northern Siberian permafrost. With its reddish-brown fur still clinging to its skin, the dog-sized calf was named Yuka Radiocarbon dating placed it at roughly 40,000 years old. Now a team of researchers has extracted from Yuka the oldest RNA molecules ever recovered, revealing traces of gene activity that survived the last ice age.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a snapshot of the last minutes or hours of Yuka\u2019s life,\u201d says University of Copenhagen genomicist Emilio M\u00e1rmol-S\u00e1nchez, lead author of a study on the discovery, which was published today in Cell.<\/p>\n Unlike DNA, RNA records which genes were active in a cell before an organism died. Extracting it is extremely difficult because the molecule is chemically unstable and rapidly destroyed by enzymes and environmental changes after death. Even RNA from living organisms, M\u00e1rmol-S\u00e1nchez notes, degrades within minutes if it is not preserved. Yet obtaining it is crucial to reconstructing how extinct animals grew, adapted to their environments or responded to disease and stress.<\/p>\n If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n The oldest RNA ever reported until now came from a 14,300-year-old \u201cwolf\u201d puppy frozen in permafrost. But when M\u00e1rmol-S\u00e1nchez received a box containing fragments of muscle and skin from 10 woolly mammoths, including Yuka, he suspected he could go even further back.<\/p>\n The skin and ear from part of the skull of a woolly mammoth that yielded ancient RNA. The skin was discovered in 2018 in Belaya Gora, near the Indigirka River in Siberia.<\/p>\n After extracting both DNA and RNA in ultraclean laboratories, the researchers compared several computational tools to ensure that the sequences they recovered truly came from mammoths rather than from modern bacteria or modern contamination. The fragments were then mapped against the genomes of modern Asian elephants and the previously reconstructed woolly mammoth genome to identify which genes the RNA originated from.<\/p>\n In Yuka\u2019s tissue, the team identified hundreds of messenger RNAs\u2014molecules that control which proteins cells make\u2014and noncoding RNAs, which have other functions. Many of the most abundant ones came from genes involved in muscle contraction and energy metabolism. These results open the door to new biological information that will allow scientists to study, for example, stress in the muscles of these ancient animals, M\u00e1rmol-S\u00e1nchez says.<\/p>\n The researchers also detected ancient muscle-related microRNAs as well as two previously unknown microRNAs that were and are unique to mammoths and elephants. The RNA sequences also showed that Yuka carried Y-chromosome genes, meaning the calf wasn\u2019t female, as previously thought, but male.<\/p>\n Oliver Smith, who helped discover the previous record-holding \u201cwolf\u201d RNA in his work as a forensic archaeologist, says the new findings show that \u201cthe potential for looking at RNA viruses in permafrost situations is entirely viable.\u201d Beyond offering valuable insights into mammoth biology, ancient RNA can also help scientists study other long-lost organisms, including ancient coronaviruses or influenza strains, adds Smith, who was not involved in the new study . This is important because it helps scientists understand which viruses might remain viable over geological timescales, as well as the risks of reintroducing infections into modern ecosystems and the gaps in their understanding of how such events could translate into real health threats.<\/p>\n If you enjoyed this article, I\u2019d like to ask for your support. 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I hope you\u2019ll support us in that mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" November 14, 2025 3 min read Oldest RNA in the World Extracted from Frozen Woolly Mammoth RNA has been extracted from an ancient woolly mammoth, providing insight into its last moments on Earth By Humberto Basilio edited by Andrea Thompson The frozen carcass of Yuka is displayed at an exhibition in Yokohama, Japan on July<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":33566,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[11953,7008,572,19215,19214,19213,4742],"class_list":{"0":"post-33565","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-mammoth","9":"tag-oldest","10":"tag-reveals","11":"tag-rna","12":"tag-unlocks","13":"tag-woolly","14":"tag-worlds"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/33566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}On supporting science journalism<\/h2>\n
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