Hair from frozen carcasses used to reconstruct woolly mammoth's genome

Scientists have decoded the genome of the woolly mammoth by analysing hairs plucked from carcasses recovered from the Siberian permafrost.

The achievement is a startling sign of the rapid progress genetics has made in recent decades. In 2003, scientists announced that the 13-year effort to read the human genome had finally been completed, at a cost of around $2.6 billion. The mammoth genome was read at one laboratory in less than a year at a cost of just over $1m.

Theoretically, it would be possible to recreate a mammoth by genetically modifying an elephant embryo to carry all of the 400,000 important genetic differences that exist between the species. With today's technology, however, scientists can only make one genetic change at a time.