"What the mammoth evolved is changes in hemoglobin that reduce the amount of heat needed to exchange oxygen," Campbell says, which allowed the animals to keep their extremities "breathing" even at very low temperatures.
The DNA changes in the mammoth hemoglobin genes differ from those in other arctic animals, an instance of convergent evolution or attaining the same end by a different genetic route.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is predicting congressional approval of the tax-cutting compromise he has reached with Republican leaders, but he's not ruling out that unhappy Democrats will make some changes in the mammoth legislation.
A 2008 study estimated that changes in climate shrank suitable mammoth habitat from 42,000 years ago to 6,000 years ago.
Fisher, who studies the extinction of mastodons and mammoths, suggests some answers could lie in nitrogen isotopes in the Patagonian bones, which can record changes in an animal's diet and, thus, its environment.
Guthrie proposes instead that changes in the world climate at the end of the Ice Age 13,000 years ago altered the frigid landscape of the far north into a steppe covered with grasses, where mammoths, horses, and other grazers flourished for 1000 years.
A mammoth climate-change plan spells out in detail how much pain each of its 27 members will have to bear if the EU is to meet ambitious targets set by national leaders last March.The aim is to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020 by at least a fifth, and more than double to 20% the amount of energy produced from renewable sources such as wind or wave power.
Will the foetus, even with as many as 70m mammoth-specific changes to its genome (this translates to around 2%), have any role to play in how its development will proceed?
This tells us what parts of the elephant genome we will need to change in order to make a mammoth.
"This basically gives you the changes that account for a mammoth being a mammoth -- the changes that allowed them to have hair, tremendous amounts of fat, large tusks," Poinar told CBS News. "This then gives us this roadmap, so to speak, of what we would need to change in an Asian elephant chromosome to make them mammoth-like".
