The four fundamental evolutionary forces - mutation, natural selection, genetic drift, and gene flow - constitute the basis of how populations and their gene pools evolve over time. Characterizing these forces provides a framework for understanding both ancient and contemporary population dynamics and informing conservation strategies. The Wrangel Island mammoth population serves as a unique natural model for such study, having become isolated around 10,000 years ago due to rising sea levels at the end of the Late Pleistocene. Following the initial bottleneck on the island, formerly part of the Beringian mainland, the population increased in effective population size and persisted on Wrangel Island for 6,000 years until their extinction approximately 4,000 years before present. This isolation precluded confounding effects of gene flow, establishing the population as an ideal model for studying extinction dynamics in a closed system. Although multiple studies have investigated the Wrangel Island mammoths at the molecular level, the primary focus on single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and adaptation has left several questions unresolved. Specifically, the radiocarbon chronology remains underexplored, spatial distributions across the island are uncertain, and the role of structural variants (SVs) and their temporal trajectories is largely unexplored. While SVs are more likely to have a functional impact compared to SNPs due to their length, their fitness consequence in extinct species, including woolly mammoths, remains largely unknown. This study aims to investigate the genetic population dynamics of Wrangel Island woolly mammoths using existing and newly generated time-series genomic data, with a particular focus on developing and implementing novel methods to increase genome resolution of low-coverage genomes and obtain insights in the role of previously understudied structural variants. Main supervisor: Love Dalén, Stockholm University/ Centre for Palaeogenetics