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Muskoxen Survived Extinction, Lost Genetic Variability

Thursday October 6, 2005

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Around 10,000 years ago the Pleistocene period came to an end and it took many large mammals, such as the mammoth, with it. One animal that survived this extinction is the tundra muskox, but it did so at the cost of decreased genetic diversity.

Researchers from the American Museum of Natural History teamed up with researchers in Russia and the Netherlands to sequence samples of ancient muskoxen DNA and compared these to the DNA of modern muskoxen. They found two sets of genes, one from surviving muskoxen and one from extinct, and that variation among modern muskoxen (Ovibus moschatus) is very diminished.

"Ovibos, one of the few high-latitude megafaunal mammals to have survived into recent times,has clearly done so with reduced genetic variability," the authors write in a recent issue of the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology. "At what point before the present this variability was lost cannot be satisfactorily established with existing data."

Muskoxen can only be found today in northern North America and Greenland, but during the Pleistocene period they roamed the artic periphery of northeastern Asia and Siberia.

--Bjorn Carey

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Credit: BMC Evolutionary Biology

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