the woolly mammoth ate forbs.
what kind of food did the woolly mammoth eat?
forbs
Na
Na
in 2005, researchers assembled a complete mitochondrial genome profile of the woolly mammoth, which allowed them to trace the close evolutionary relationship between mammoths and asian elephants ("elephas maximus"). a 2015 dna review confirmed asian elephants as the closest living relative of the woolly mammoth. african elephants ("loxodonta africana") branched away from this clade around 6 million years ago, close to the time of the similar split between chimpanzees and humans. before the publication of the neanderthal genome, many researchers expected the first fully sequenced nuclear genome of an extinct species would be that of the mammoth. a 2010 study confirmed these relationships, and suggested the mammoth and asian elephant lineages diverged 5.8–7.8 million years ago, while african elephants diverged from an earlier common ancestor 6.6–8.8 million years ago. in 2008, much of the woolly mammoth's chromosomal dna was mapped. the analysis showed that the woolly mammoth and the african elephant are 98.55% to 99.40% identical. the team mapped the woolly mammoth's nuclear genome sequence by extracting dna from the hair follicles of both a 20,000-year-old mammoth retrieved from permafrost and another that died 60,000 years ago. in 2012, proteins were confidently identified for the first time, collected from a 43,000-year-old woolly mammoth.
woolly mammoth