Thursday, July 06, 2006

What color is a mammoth?

They may have come in several colors, including red and blond. That news from Holger Roempler of the University of Leipzig in Germany, whose team extracted DNA from a bone 43,000 years old. Mammoth DNA included the gene that codes for a protein which allows mammals (humans, for example) to have several different colors of hair. So we don't know if there were blond mammoths, but there might have been.

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