Enlarge / An artist’s conception of one of the last mammoths of Wrangel Island.Beth Zaiken
A small group of woolly mammoths became trapped on Wrangel Island around 10,000 years ago when rising sea levels separated the island from mainland Siberia. Small, isolated populations of animals lead to inbreeding and genetic defects, and it has long been thought that the Wrangel Island mammoths ultimately succumbed to this problem about 4,000 years ago.
A paper in Cell on Thursday, however, compared 50,000 years of genomes from mainland and isolated Wrangel Island mammoths and found that this was not the case. What the authors
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