You would think after being extinct for thousands of years, mammoths would have no more surprises. Well, the world's oldest DNA's samples say otherwise, to mammoth molars pulled from the permafrost in north eastern Siberia contained didna dating back to more than a million years ago. It's a big leap backwards in time that that's which was Luca Dillon is at the center for Paleo Genetics in Stockholm. And he says this mammoth DNI is twice as old as the previous record holder, which came from an ancient horse Now sequencing million year old knee like this was impossible. Just a few years ago samples that old were just too small to work with. Now researchers can see incredibly small samples, but it's challenging to put them together. Tom Vander Vault also works with the center for Paleo Genetics. Imagine if you're Edna is fragment that into literally millions of tiny pieces. It is a painstaking puzzle. Well, it's not only one parcel, it's actually multiple. Purcell's so imagine. You know, you have one parcel for the malice genome. But then you have another passage for the whole bacterial content of the examples. You have another possible for the human Dina for the paleontologists and us in the lab. Once they had finished sorting out the mammoth bits. The DNI gave the scientists a unique window into mammoth evolution. Delenn says the standard view holds there was only one mammoth species in Siberia a couple million years ago. What we find now is that actually we found two different lineages. We can't really say they're different species, but they're clearly two different genetic types of malice so that that came as a complete surprise to us. The ancient DNI. A also gives clues the origins of the Columbian mammoth, which lived in North and Central America. Here's Tom Vander Volk again Good kind of show that this Colombian moment is a hybrid species between two off the genetic lineages. So one is the new general image that we found in this paper. And the other is the willing mama genetic limits, So to say their work appears today in the journal Nature. Alfred Rocca of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne wasn't involved in the work, but wrote on accompanying editorial. It's an absolutely amazing discovery. It takes back field of ancient DNAs to Twice is far in geological time as before, and that genetic puzzling unlocks the possibility. He says that we may soon find more evolutionary play by plays hiding in super