Naturalist Night: Ancient DNA: Genetic Tales of the Ice Age Megafauna

The permafrost of far northwestern North America – Alaska and Yukon Territory of Canada – holds a treasure trove of ice age fossils, which have excellent ancient DNA preservation and the potential to address many unanswered questions concerning extinct large mammals, the megafauna. In this talk, Dr. Peter Heintzman will discuss what we have learnt from the ancient DNA of three extinct ice age species: the Western camel, the Steppe bison, and the iconic Woolly mammoth. We will explore how ancient DNA resolved the relationship of the Western camel to living camels and, using Steppe bison, helped unravel when the ‘ice free corridor’ – a key migration route for animals and people between far northwestern and interior North America – opened at the end of the ice age. We will lastly discover exactly when and how the last population of Woolly mammoths in North America, which lived on St. Paul Island off the coast of Alaska, became extinct. Dr. Peter Heintzman uses ancient DNA from ice age plants and animals to explore how past climatic and environmental changes impacted upon the evolution and biodiversity of ice age ecosystems. He received his bachelors degree in Biology from Sheffield University, masters degree in Paleobiology from Bristol University, and PhD in ancient DNA and evolution from Royal Holloway, University of London; all in the UK. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the paleogenomics laboratory at the University of California Santa Cruz, where he is working on a variety of ice age beasts, including mammoths, bison, horses, camels, and rhinos.