Woolly mammoth fact file

The southernmost woolly mammoth specimen was discovered in the Shandong province of China. The mammoth steppe resembled the grassy steppes found in Russia today, but with a greater diversity and abundance of plant species.

Like modern elephants, the woolly mammoth appears to have been social. The mammoth is believed to have used its tusks to fight, to defend itself from predators, and to forage. Although little is known for sure about woolly mammoth reproduction, it was probably very similar to that of modern elephants. The mating season is likely to have occurred during summer or autumn. It is likely that females probably gave birth to a single calf during spring or summer after a long gestation period of 21 to 22 months.

A newborn woolly mammoth weighed around 90 kg lb. The calves were nursed for at least 3 years and weaned gradually. Small milk tusks appeared around the age of 6 months and were replaced by permanent tusks about a year later. The woolly mammoth was an herbivore whose diet mainly consisted of grasses and sedges.

Other plant material, including shrubs, twigs, tree bark, mosses, leaves, flowers, fruit, berries and nuts, would also have been consumed.

The animal used its 4 large molars to grind up tough vegetation. The impressive tusks would have been used as tools to dig up plants, remove snow to uncover vegetation, strip bark off trees and break ice to access drinking water. A fully-grown woolly mammoth would have required approximately kg lb. The species had the ability to store fat in the neck and the withers the ridge between the shoulder blades for times when food was scarce. Both young woolly mammoths and sickly adults were vulnerable to predation by animals such as wolves, cave hyenas as well as saber-toothed cats and other large felines.

Most woolly mammoth populations disappeared 14, to 10, years ago during the Quaternary extinction event at the end of the Pleistocene epoch. The last mainland population of woolly mammoths died out in the Kyttyk Peninsula in Siberia 9, years ago, but a few isolated island populations survived for longer.

By the end of the last Ice Age, about 10, years ago, pretty much all the world's 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 BCE. Since they subsisted on limited resources, Wrangel Island mammoths were much smaller than their woolly relatives and are often referred to as dwarf elephants.

Even 10, years after the last Ice Age, the northern reaches of Canada, Alaska, and Siberia are very, very cold, which helps to explain the amazing number of woolly mammoths discovered mummified, nearly intact, in solid blocks of ice.

Identifying, isolating, and hacking out these giant corpses is the easy part; what's harder is keeping the remains from disintegrating once they reach room temperature. Because woolly mammoths went extinct relatively recently and were closely related to modern elephants, scientists might be able to harvest the DNA of Mammuthus primigenius and incubate a fetus in a living pachyderm, a process known as "de-extinction.

This same trick is unlikely to work for dinosaurs, because DNA doesn't keep well over tens of millions of years. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance.

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