Said to be extinct thousands of years ago, scientists who are tracking illegal poaching of elephant ivory in Cambodia have found an unexpected turn of events, they found DNA of woolly mammoths in trinkets.
“It was a surprise for us to find trinkets made from woolly mammoth ivory in circulation, especially so early into our testing and in a tropical country like Cambodia,” said Dr Alex Ball, who runs the WildGenes project.
“It is very hard to say what the implications of this finding are for existing elephant populations; however, we plan to continue our research and will use genetics to work out where it has come from.”
(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)
