In 2001, while scanning a river bank in northern Alaska for fossils, Oxford PhD student Beth Shapiro saw her advisor Alan Cooper, a pioneer in the field of ancient DNA, tugging on something big embedded in the frozen earth. When Shapiro got closer, she saw that Cooper had uncovered a late Pleistocene-era woolly mammoth femur, which was likely more than 21,000 years old.
“It was the first time I’d seen such a big bone,” says Shapiro. “It was almost as tall as I am, and I’m about five foot.”
Once they removed the femur from the ice, Shapiro and her colleagues extracted and sequenced some of the mammoth’s DNA and published one of the first woolly mammoth genome sequences 5 years later.1
After the success of her Alaskan trip, expeditions to cold locations in search of preserved DNA became routine for Shapiro. She trekked to the frozen tundra of the ...
