Penn State University professor Beth Shapiro, who recently won a coveted $500,000 MacArthur "genius" award, sometimes jokes that she belongs to the only scientific discipline that was "inspired by a cheesy 1990s action novel."

She is referring to Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park," in which scientists use ancient DNA to bring dinosaurs back to life, with horrific and hair-raising results.

Dr. Shapiro studies ancient DNA herself, and besides the fact that there are currently insurmountable hurdles to cloning extinct animals, she has no interest in bringing such creatures back to life.

She does want to use their DNA to determine how their populations changed or why some of them died off, though, and she hopes that, eventually, those findings will help scientists decide how to preserve species during the current period of global warming.

She was one of 24 people who got a MacArthur award this year. The group included artists, a novelist, an economist, a physicist and an ornithologist, among others. The no-strings-attached awards are determined in secret, and winners don't find out they are being considered until they get a call that they've been selected.

The foundation says the award goes to "talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction." Since it was inaugurated in 1981, 805 people have received the award.

While it's a handsome prize, Dr. Shapiro noted in an interview last week that $500,000 spread over five years is not enough money to launch a major project in her field.

The beauty of it is that the money can be used for any purpose the recipient desires, such as "trying some crazy thing that might not work but if it does, you will have this enormous payout and can go to traditional funding agencies for more money."

She hasn't decided what she will use the grant for yet, but it may very well involve sleeping in a tent someplace inhospitable.

Last year, she camped out in a tent in Siberia, where the mosquitoes were so thick they sounded like rain pattering against the tent flap. And even though she is currently seven months pregnant, she hopes to spend part of next summer at a similar outpost in the Yukon.

She goes to these permafrost reaches of the globe because that's where the bones of ancient species are best preserved.

It's not dinosaurs she looks for; no one has successfully extracted dinosaur DNA yet. Instead, she focuses on the "megafauna" -- literally, large animals -- that lived from a couple million to thousands of years ago.

This group includes familiar creatures such as the woolly mammoth and saber-toothed cat, but also such lesser known oddities as the giant beaver, which weighed up to 450 pounds; the giant sloth, which could stand 20 feet high; or Aepycamelus, a 10-foot-high camel with a giraffe's neck.

When they recover bones of such specimens, Dr. Shapiro and her colleagues around the world look for DNA from mitochondria, cellular energy packets inside cells that are passed down exclusively from females.

By focusing on one region of the mitochondrial genome, they can see how much it has evolved, and from that, they can calculate how much diversity a species had over time.

"The way I describe it is, if you were thinking about human populations, and you went to a tiny village and randomly sampled two individuals, they may have shared a common ancestor not so long ago, and you wouldn't have very much difference" in their DNA markers, "but if you sampled random students in my introductory biology class, they would have a much older common ancestor and you would see much larger differences in their DNA markers."

By doing such analysis on the bones of an extinct dodo, Dr. Shapiro discovered that the flightless bird, which died off hundreds of years ago, is most closely related to the present-day nicobar pigeon, a beautifully iridescent bird in South Asia.

Her team also found that even though hunters killed off nearly all the bison on the Great Plains in the late 1800s, the creatures actually got into trouble much earlier. Based on 800 ancient samples they had collected, team members found the bison had lost 99 percent of their genetic diversity nearly 30,000 years ago, long before humans had arrived in their habitat.

No one yet knows why huge creatures like the mammoth and giant sloth died off, she said, or why they were so large in the first place, but better genetic analysis and improved methods for charting environmental changes in the same eras may yield answers in the future, she said.

If they can get a better idea of how temperature changes and other environmental factors contributed to the extinction of the megafauna, scientists may have better tools for saving animals as they go through habitat fluctuations today, Dr. Shapiro said.

Along the way, it may become technically feasible to clone some of the ancient creatures. A different Penn State team is working on such a project now with the woolly mammoth.

Count her out, though.

Not only might it cost $50 million to clone a mammoth, she estimates, but "what's the point? Why bring back a mammoth, and where are we going to put it? We can't use it to learn about its behavior because it won't be with other mammoths.

"All we can bring it back for is our own amusement, and to me, that's just mean, if it has no other purpose."

Looking for more from the Post-Gazette? Join PG+, our members-only web site. You'll get exclusive sports content, opinion, financial information, discounts from retailers and restaurants, and more. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.