woolly mammoth

(Newser) - The computer-generated critters in the movie 10,000 BC—due out Friday—all actually existed at some point, but their portrayal in the film is scientifically sketchy. Saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths weren't as big as portrayed, and the film's huge terror birds died out 40 million years ago. One...

(Newser) - Irregular verbs, much like the Kennewick Man, evolve. But, much like the woolly mammoth, sometimes they vanish altogether, and linguists and evolutionary theorists have teamed up to compute their extinction times—in terms of half-lives. The study, published this week in Nature, shows that irregular forms of lesser-used verbs are...

(Newser) - Instead of combing databases for clues about woolly mammoth DNA, scientists literally combed the extinct mammals, and the technique has led to a breakthrough: genetic information reconstructed from a hair shaft. Long considered an inferior source for DNA mining, hair turns out to benefit from the presence of keratin, a...