prehistorical DNA extracted from Ice Age camel fossils discovered in the Yukon of Canada unwrap that – despite how they look – the animals are more closely related to today ’s camels in Africa and Asia than to South American alpacas and llama . Thefindings , release inMolecular Biology and Evolutionlast week , rewrite the evolutionary story of the camel family .
Until about 13,000 years ago , westerly camels , Camelopscf.hesternus , used to roam westerly and central North America . They had a individual hump , a long neck opening , and tenacious legs . According topaleontologist Grant Zazula with the Government of Yukon , researchers thought late Pleistocene western camel were like “ gargantuan llamas ” or “ llamas on steroids . ” For years , the brute were thought to be closely related to the modern camelids of South America : llamas , guanacos , alpacas , and vicuñas .
ground on carbon 14 date , Ice Age western camel live in the southern parts of North America migrated northwards into Alaska and the Yukon just once , about 100,000 years ago , during a brief menses of warmer temperatures . They went extinct around the final stage of the Ice Age , and because so few of them ventured so far north , camel fossil in the arctic are very rarified . But those that have been discovered were preserved in permafrost – which think that DNA can be extracted .
In 2008 , miners hydraulically stripping the ground in the Klondike gold orbit near Dawson City in the Yukon uncovered three fossils . “ We could n’t care less about the gold,”Zazula say . “ For us the gold is the fossils because it ’s this incredible resource for understanding extinct and ancient creature of the Ice Age . It ’s really our gold mine for certain . ”
When he and a team precede byPeter Heintzman from the University of California , Santa Cruz , study the fossils and the genomic data curb within , they find that the Ice Age camel are more intimately tied to New camels living in Asia , Arabia and Africa than they are to the alpacas and llamas that they resemble . The molecular information also suggests that western camels separate off from the branch that include today ’s camel about 10 million old age ago or so , in the Late Miocene .
" With ancient desoxyribonucleic acid and inherited technologies now , we can actually reveal a whole lot more about their chronicle , and sometimes fauna that wait like one another may not be even closely related at all,“Zazula adds . " And that ’s what we ’re see with this . "
[ ViaThe Globe and Mail ]
Images : Government of Yukon
