climate and predation by man the driving force. Just a guess.

as numbers fall, the gene pool shrinks, and bad mutations spike.

with the Peregrine Fund and their breeding program to recover (breed and release) a viable population of peregrines in the US.

They had very few to begin with as the birds had died out in the wild and their only breeding stock was provided by falconers (no one had tried to breed them before so the whole thing was a long-shot at best).

They succeeded partly because of their meticulous tracking of bloodlines, to avoid just the sort of issues that develop in a limited gene pool.

show more errors then the 4,000 year old DNA?

I assume that if the animal quickly froze in the ice and was covered in snow it would be better preserved than if it took a while to freeze and it was not quickly buried in the snow and ice. This is not my field of expertise. I'm just asking if anyone out there knows the answer.

Imagine that you had millions of copies of, say, Casablanca on film. They were all randomly chopped up. By lining up sections of film with matching frames from other copies, you can eventually get a copy of every frame, in order. One segment has frames 79 through 130, another frames 110 through 156. By matching frames 110 through 130, you now know frames 79 through 156. Now, film is much easier as every frame is unique and DNA only has 4 "frames", but it is essentially the same concept match the sequence of the fragments with the sequence of other fragments and you get the entire work back. Every cell had a copy of the DNA.

A mutation would be Rick saying "Of all the gin joints, have Paris looking at you, kid." or the Capt saying "Round up all the usual gambling in this establishment."

There's a difference between a mutation and degradation.

so the basically turned in howard hughes...