After an eight-year effort to recover DNA from Greenland’s frozen interior, researchers say they’ve managed to sequence gene fragments from ancient fish, plants, and even a mastodon that lived 2 million years ago.
It’s the oldest DNA ever recovered, beating the mark set only last year when a different team recovered genetic material from a million-year-old mammoth tooth.
The new effort looked at genetic material that was left behind by dozens of species and washed into sediment layers long ago when Greenland was much warmer than today.
“Here you are getting the whole ecosystem,” says Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, who led the effort. “You know exactly that at this time, and this place, these organisms were together.”
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