Science mourns DNA pioneer Wilkins
Saber-toothed cats, mastodons, giant sloths, woolly rhinos, and many other big, shaggy mammals are widely thought to have died out around the end of the last ice age, some 10,500 years ago. More recently, however, evidence has emerged that at least two of the spectacular megafauna of the Pleistocene era (1.6 million to 10,000 years ago) clung on until recent times. In the 1990s mammoth remains found on an island north of Arctic Siberia revealed the animals still roamed a tiny corner of the planet just 3,600 years ago. Tantalizingly, this was almost a thousand years after the first pyramids were built in ancient Egypt. Now a new study, published tomorrow in the science journal Nature, suggests that another striking mammal, the Irish elk, likewise lived way beyond the last ice age.
DNA pioneer Professor Maurice Wilkins has died. Nobel Laureate Wilkins, 87, played an important role in the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, the molecule that carries our "life code". He was awarded the prize in 1962 with Francis Crick and James Watson; their co-discoverer was Rosalind Franklin.