Penn State University scientists are to first to untangle the genetic code of an extinct animal, using a ball of woolly mammoth hair purchased on eBay for $130. First, they had to make sure the brownish-red hair really comes from a woolly mammoth. After that, they washed and bleached it and, from the sterilized hair shafts of the mammal, they obtained genetic material bearing clues about why mammoths died out and a guide for saving other near-extinct animals.

The study is reported in today’s issue of the journal Nature and is has created a sort of controversy: everybody wants to know if a mammoth can be created, even if this wasn’t the purpose of the research. The most likely path toward resurrecting the Ice Age mammal would be to make about 20,000 changes or substitutions to an elephant, so that all protein sequences in the elephant would be the same as in the woolly mammoth.

However, scientists have said that it should be possible to re-create any extinct creature that lived within the last 100,000 years, given suitable genetic material. One of the lead scientists told the media: "By deciphering this genome we could, in theory, generate data that one day may help other researchers to bring the woolly mammoth back to life by inserting the uniquely mammoth DNA sequences into the genome of the modern-day elephant.”

For ancient humans, meeting a woolly mammoth may have been a real treat. According to the Mammoth Genome Project, the enormous amount of meat coming from a six- to eight-ton animal would have fed 400 people for several weeks. But an interesting fact shows that chilled mammoth meat probably smelled and tasted like Limburger cheese. Of course, hygiene standards and dietary options were different back then.

The genome data set now consists of 4 billion DNA bases, but the scientists believe that only 3.3 billion of them belong in the mammoth genome. The extra DNA may belong to bacteria, fungi, or something else that might have contaminated the genetic sample, comprised of hairs from a frozen mammoth recovered from the Siberian permafrost. In order to help Penn State University researchers, the scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard are sequencing the genome of the African elephant for comparison with the woolly mammoth genome, to see how it should look like.

Webb Miller, a professor of biology, computer science and engineering at Penn State, told the media: "Only after the genome of the African elephant has been completed will we be able to make a final assessment about how much of the full woolly-mammoth genome we have sequenced.” The authors believe the sequence is about 80 percent complete. A fast sequencing machine made by 454 Life Sciences, a Roche company, made the work possible, as it has so far sequenced the genome for 28 mammals, including humans, dogs, cats, rats and pigs.