JUST IN: Ancient DNA has been extracted from a 1.2 million-year-old mammoth — the oldest DNA that’s ever been recovered by a long way.

https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/worlds-oldest-dna-recovered-and-it-comes-from-a-12-millionyearold-mammoth/

Along with simply being an impressive feat, the project has also revealed a new lineage in the mammoth family: the Krestovka mammoth.

The genetic material was picked up from the teeth of three mammoths found buried in the Siberian permafrost during the 1970s. The DNA, however, had become extremely degraded over the millennia.

Instead of having nice long strands of DNA to analyse, the researchers were confronted with billions of tiny odd fragments of DNA, which they had to painstakingly piece together like a puzzle.