In 2024, scientists studied a 52,000-year-old mammoth, and found something ancient DNA was never expected to keep

A remarkably preserved Siberian woolly mammoth, dating back 52,000 years, has yielded an astonishing discovery: fossilized chromosomes. This unprecedented find, made possible by natural freeze-drying, reveals the ancient genome's three-dimensional structure, offering a groundbreaking glimpse into gene organization previously thought impossible to retrieve from such ancient samples.