“Why
do we humans have such a fascination with woolly mammoths?”
asks
Hendrik Poinar.
“Woollys
are a quintessential image of the Ice Age;
We
seem to have a deep connection with them as we do with elephants,”
says Poinar in this sci-fi worthy talk . I have to admit there's a
part of the child in me that wants to see these majestic creatures
walk across the permafrost of the North. It may be even now, thanks
to a new development. An incredible discovery on the permafrost of
an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean
propelled
the conversation of de-extincting mammoths forward.
Blood,
possibly in liquid form and muscle tissue was discovcered
inside
the well-preserved body of a 10,000 to 15,000 year old female woolly
mammoth ~ to help ignite our imagination. Bring back the woolly
mammoth!
The
Woolly Mammoths lived in the north closer to the glaciers
of
the Ice Ages from Alaska through Canada
and
east to the Great Lakes and New England.
Facts About the
Magnificent Woolly Mammoth
Contrary
to common belief, the woolly mammoth was hardly mammoth in size.
They were roughly about the size of modern African elephants. A
male woolly mammoth 's shoulder height was 9 to 11 feet tall and
weighed around 6 tons. Its cousin the Steppe
Mammoth
was perhaps the largest one in the family ~ growing up to 13 to 15
feet tall.
The ears of a woollly mammoth were shorter than the modern elephants'
ears. Like their thick coat of fur, their shortened ears were an
important cold-weather adaptation because it minimized frostbite.
Scienists can discern a woolly mammoth's age from the rings of its
tusk ~ like looking at the rings of a tree. The tusk yields more
finite detail than a tree trunk ~ revealing a major line for each
year and a line for the weeks and days in between. Scientists can
even tell the season when a woolly mammoth died as the darker
increments correspond to summers. The thickness or thinness of the
rings indicate the health of the mammoth during that time; the tusk
would grow during favourable conditions.
The
woolly mammoth was not the only 'woolly' type of animal. The
woolly rhinoceros
co-existed with the woolly mammoth. Like the woolly mammoth, the
rhino adapted to the cold with a furry coat...and was depicted by
human ancestors in cave paintings (becoming extinct around the same
time).
By
the end of the Ice Age about 10,000 years ago, much of the world
mammoths had succumbed to Climate
Change
and predation
by humans.
The exception was a small population of woolly mammoths that lived on
Wrangel Island off the coast of Siberia until 1700 BC. Subsisting on
limited resources, Wrangel Island mammoths grew to much smaller sizes
than their Woolly Mammoth relatives and were often referred to as
dwarf
elephants. Fortunately
for scientists, the Woolly Mammoths have been preserved by
permafrost.
Cave
paintings drawn by ice age humans, show the important relationship
they had with the woolly mammoths. The
Rouffignac cave
in France has 158 depictions of mammoths, making up about 70% of the
represented animals dating back to an earlier period. There is also
evidence of the use of bones and tusks by humans to create portable
art objects, shelters, tools, furniture and even burials.
Today
the hunt is on for woolly mammoth tusks in the Arctic Siberia. Due
to global warning, the melting permafrost has begun revealing these
hidden ivory treasures for a group of local
tusk-hunters to find and sell.
A tusk can range from 10 to 13 feet in length and a top-grade
mammoth tusk is worth around $400 per pound. Mammoth ivory, unlike
elephant ivory, is legal.
Their large curved tusks may have been used for fighting.
They may have also been used as digging tools for foraging meals
of shrubs, grasses, roots and other small plants under the snow.
The
first fully documented woolly mammoth skeleton was discovered in
1799. It was brought to the Zoological Museum of the Zoological
Institute of the Russian Academy of Science in 1806 where
Wilhelm Gottlieb
Tilesius
put the pieces together Basing his task off an Indian elephant
skeleton, Tilesius was successful in reconstructing the first
skeleton of an extinct animal except for one error. He put the tusks
in the wrong sockets, so that they curved outward instead of inward.
The
coat of a woolly mammoth consisted of a guard
of foot long hairs
and an undercoat of shorter hairs. Preserved mammoth hair looks
orange in colour; however, researchers believe the pigment was
changed because of prolonged burial in the ground.
Even
a kid can discover a preserved mammoth. In September 2012 in Russia,
an 11-year-old boy named Yevgeny
Zhenya
Saliner
happened upon an extremely well-preserved woolly mammoth carcass
while walking his dogs. The remains were of a 16-year-old male
woolly mammoth that died about 30,000 years ago. The discovery
helped scientists conclude that the large lumps on a mamoth back
were extra stores of fat to help it survive winters. The mammoth was
nicknamed
Zhenya.
It was here, that in May 2007 a reindeer herder stumbled on the
corpse
of a perfectly preserved female baby woolly mammoth
which
he named Lyuba
after
his wife.
The
final resting place of woolly mammoths was Wrangel Island in the
Arctic. Although most of the woolly mammoth population died out by
10,000 years ago, a small population of 500 to 1,000 woolly mammoths
lived
on Wrangel Island
until 1650 BC. That is only about 4,000 years ago! For context,
Egyptian pharoahs were midway through their empire and it was about
1,000
years after the Giza pyramids were built.
The reason for the demise of these woolly mammoths are unknown.
Opinion of Hendrik Poiner:
Scientists always thought that because the Mammoths roamed
such a large territory from Western European Woolly Mammoths,
that
North American Woolly Mammoths were simply a side-show
of no particular significance to the evolution of the species.
Future
Hope
Because Woolly Mammoths went extinct recently and related
more closely to modern elephants,
scientists may be able to harvest the DNA and its incubated fetus
in
a living process known as de-extinction.
A team of researchers recently announced they have decoded
the
complete gnomes of
two 40,000 year-old woolly mammoth species.
Written by Merle Baird-Kerr...August 4, 2018
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