WOOLLY MAMMOTH HAIR. ...

Description

WOOLLY MAMMOTH HAIR
Mammuthus primigenius
Pleistocene
Yakatia, Siberia, Russia
This rare and comparatively large sample of Woolly Mammoth "wool" was recovered from the frozen carcass of an Ice Age mammoth in the wilds of Siberia. The mammoth's thick shaggy coating of hair could grow up to 20 inches long, and its skin contained numerous sebaceous glands which secreted greasy fat into the hair further to improve its insulating qualities. Such hair has been used to collect approximately 80% of the mammoth's DNA and it has been established that their genome is similar enough to that of the African elephant that a complex procedure of cell-modification and artificial insemination could in fact produce a live mammoth birth from an elephant mother. The present sample comprises good thick hairs, representing a larger amount than one is usually able to obtain of these rare Ice Age remnants.

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