The sequence comes from DNA in hair snipped from two woolly mammoths whose bodies have been preserved in Siberian permafrost for tens of thousands of years.

Important gaps in the picture remain, but even so, enough data is there to make a comparison between the woolly mammoth and its closest living relative, the elephant, they said.

The two species are so similar that their DNA differs by just 0.6 percent, or about half the differences between humans and chimps.

The team made a first breakthrough last year by using mammoth hair to extract mitochondrial DNA, genetic material that is inherited from the female line.

The hair technique marks a giant's step forward compared to the previous method, which consisted of teasing DNA out of the remains of frozen bone marrow.

Rebuilding the mammoth's genetic code has fired speculation that scientists may one day revive this species and other Ice Age beasts on the lines of the Hollywood movie "Jurassic Park."

Researchers say it should one day be theoretically possible to replicate a mammoth by taking the elephant's genome, stripping out the code that is specific to the elephant and replacing it with code specific to the mammoth.