The oldest DNA ever analyzed shows that reindeer and mastodons once wandered a nearly unrecognizable Greenland
since the 1980s. Under worst-case climate change scenarios regional temperatures could eventually spike nearly as high as those seen in the era represented by the samples.
But “there was a legacy of incredible biodiversity,” says Natalia Rybczynski, a paleobiologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature, who was not involved in the study. The warmth had supported forests across the Arctic,“It's amazing to see that retained” even as the climate has begun to cool, she says. “If we continued sequencing, taking samples and looking deeper, my prediction is that we would have at some point captured some of the carnivores,” he says.In 2006, some of the team members visited thesite in northern Greenland, prospecting for frozen dirt that might contain preserved DNA.
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