The 2 million-year-old DNA samples revealed the now largely lifeless polar region was once home to rich plant and animal life — including elephant-like mammals known as mastodons, reindeer, hares, lemmings, geese, birch trees and poplars, according to new research published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.The finding is the work of scientists in Denmark who were able to detect and retrieve environmental DNA — genetic material shed into the environment by all living organisms — in tiny amounts of sediment taken from the København Formation, in the mouth of a fjord in the Arctic Ocean in Greenland’s northernmost point, during a 2006 expedition.“The first thing that blew our mind when we’re looking at this data is obviously this mastodon and the presence of it that far north, which is quite far north of what we knew as its natural range,” said study coauthor Mikkel Pedersen, an assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre, at a news conference.People had known from macrofossils that there had been trees, some kind of forest up there, but the DNA allowed us to identify many more taxa (types of living organisms),” said Willerslev, who led the research.Extracting the fragments of genetic code from the sediment took a great deal of scientific detective work and several painstaking attempts — after the team established for the first time that DNA was hidden in clay and quartz in the sediment and could be detached from it."