Ari Daniel
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Their skeletons tell a story about how they grew.
University of Cape Town paleobiologist Anousia Chinsami-Toran and her colleagues injected several crocs with an antibiotic which got taken up in their bones.
When they later looked at those bones, they found more rings than expected.
This may have implications for dinosaur bones, suggesting some dinos may have been younger when they perished than previously thought.
Researchers not involved in the study, however, argue it's premature to throw out growth rings as annual age markers.
Researchers sampled 10 mammoths.
They then painstakingly extracted and analyzed RNA, the molecule that translates DNA into the building of an actual organism.
Most of it was too fragmented, but three of the mammoths had sufficient material to analyze.
In one of the best-preserved animals, Stockholm University paleogeneticist Löwe Dahlen and his colleagues found RNA related to muscle function and stress.
Delen says the results point the way to the potential study of ancient RNA viruses that have infected humans over millennia.
For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel.
University of Rochester biologist Vera Gerbanova had good reason to be interested in animals that can live more than 200 years.
She connected with an Alaskan Inuit community that provided her with tissue samples from animals collected during their subsistence hunt.
She and her colleagues found that bowhead cells were far better at DNA repair than human cells, an ability due, at least in part, to a particular protein.
Girbanova says boosting the level of this protein in humans might one day help slow down our accumulation of mutations, reducing the risk of cancer.
University of Rochester biologist Vera Gerbanova had good reason to be interested in animals that can live more than 200 years.
She connected with an Alaskan Inuit community that provided her with tissue samples from animals collected during their subsistence hunt.
She and her colleagues found that bowhead cells were far better at DNA repair than human cells, an ability due, at least in part, to a particular protein.