The oldest known woolly mammoth fossil has been discovered in North America and researchers have uncovered its genetic secrets, a new study suggests.
The 216,000-year-old tooth was found along the Old Crow River in the Yukon territory in Canada, and it confirms that woolly mammoths arrived in the region at least 100,000 years earlier than previously thought by scientists.
The study’s lead author and a researcher at the Centre for Palaeogenetics at Stockholm University in Sweden, Camilo Chacon-Duque, told Live Science that the find was unusual because most mammoth specimens of North America of this age likely belong to other species that existed before woolly mammoths.
“To our knowledge, the Old Crow mammoth is the oldest North American mammoth fossil that can be morphologically identified with confidence as a woolly mammoth,” Chacon-Duque said.
DNA was extracted from the Old Crow mammoth as part of an extensive study of mammoth genetics. The researchers revealed “long-lost” genetic diversity from different mammoth lineages across more than a million years of their evolutionary history, according to a statement from Stockholm University.
The Old Crow woolly mammoth’s DNA was in the oldest group of samples in the analysis, described as “deep-time DNA”, but it wasn’t the oldest. The oldest DNA, from Russia, was around 1.3 million years old.
The findings were published online on April 9, 2025 in the journal of Molecular Biology and Evolution.
