The
woolly mammoth (
Mammuthus
primigenius), also called the
tundra mammoth,
is an extinct species of
mammoth.
This
animal is known from bones and frozen carcasses from northern
North America and northern Eurasia with the best preserved carcasses in
Siberia
.
This mammoth species was first recorded in (possibly 150,000 years
old) deposits of the
second last
glaciation in
Eurasia. They were derived
from
steppe mammoths (
Mammuthus
trogontherii).
It
disappeared from most of its range at the end of the Pleistocene (10,000 years ago), with a dwarfed
race still living on Wrangel Island
until roughly 1700
BC.
Description
The woolly mammoth is common in the fossil record. Unlike most
other prehistoric animals, their remains are often not literally
fossilized - that is, turned into stone - but rather are preserved
in their organic state. This is due in part to the frozen climate
of their habitats, and also to their massive size. Woolly mammoths
are therefore among the best-understood prehistoric vertebrates
known to science in terms of anatomy.
Woolly mammoths lived in two groups (maybe subspecies). One group
stayed in the middle of the high Arctic, while the other group had
a much wider range.
While large, woolly mammoths were not as gigantic as sometimes
imagined. In fact, they were not noticeably taller than present-day
Asian elephants, though they were heavier. Fully grown mammoth
bulls reached heights between and ; the dwarf varieties reached
between and . They could weigh up to 8 tonnes.
Woolly mammoths had a number of adaptations to the cold, most
famously the thick layer of shaggy hair, up to 1 meter in length
with a fine underwool, for which the woolly mammoth is named. The
coats were similar to those of
muskoxen and
it is likely mammoths moulted in summer. They also had far smaller
ears than modern elephants; the largest mammoth ear found so far
was only long, compared to for an
African elephant. Other characteristic
features included a high, peaked head that appears knob-like in
many cave paintings and a high shoulder hump resulting from long
spines on the neck vertebrae that probably carried fat deposits.
Another feature at times found in cave paintings was confirmed by
the discovery of the nearly intact remains of a baby mammoth named
"
Dima". Unlike the trunk lobes of living
elephants, Dima's upper lip at the tip of the trunk had a broad
lobe feature, while the lower lip had a broad, squarish flap.
Their teeth were also adapted to their diet of coarse tundra
grasses, with more plates and a higher crown than their southern
relatives. Their skin was no thicker than that of present-day
elephants, but unlike elephants they had numerous
sebaceous glands in their skin which
secreted greasy fat into their hair, improving its insulating
qualities. They had a layer of fat up to thick under the skin
which, like the
blubber of
whales, helped to keep them warm.
Woolly mammoths had extremely long tusks — up to long — which were
markedly curved, to a much greater extent than those of elephants.
It is not clear whether the tusks were a specific adaptation to
their environment, but it has been suggested that mammoths may have
used their tusks as shovels to clear snow from the ground and reach
the vegetation buried below. This is evidenced by flat sections on
the ventral surface of some tusks. It has also been observed in
many specimens that there may be an amount of wear on top of the
tusk that would suggest some animals had a preference as to which
tusk it rested its trunk on.
Extinction
It was
generally assumed that the last woolly mammoths vanished from
Europe and Southern Siberia
about 10,000
BC, but new findings show that some were still present there about
8,000 BC. Only slightly later the woolly mammoths also
disappeared from continental Northern Siberia. Woolly mammoths as
well as
Columbian mammoths
disappeared also from the North American continent at the end of
the
last ice age.
A small population of
woolly mammoths survived on St.
Paul Island, Alaska, up until 3,750 BC, while another remained
on Wrangel
Island
, located in the Arctic Ocean
, up until 1700 BC.
Possibly due to their limited food supply, these animals were a
dwarf variety, thus much smaller than
the original Pleistocene woolly mammoth. However, the Wrangel
Island mammoths should not be confused with the Channel Islands
Pygmy Mammoth,
Mammuthus
exilis, which was a different species.
Most woolly mammoths died out at the end of the
Pleistocene, as a result of climate change
and/or human hunting pressure.
In 2008 a study conducted by the Museo Nacional
de Ciencias Naturales
in Spain determined that warming temperatures had
reduced mammoth habitat considerably, putting the woolly mammoth
population in sharp decline, before the appearance of humans in
their territory. Glacial retreat shrank mammoth habitat from
42,000 years ago to 6,000 years ago. Although a similarly drastic
loss of habitat occurred at the end of the
Saale glaciation 125,000 years ago, human
pressure during the later warming period was sufficient to push the
mammoth over the brink. The study employed the use of climate
models and fossil remains to make these determinations.
However, considering that the longest surviving populations were
island populations with relatively tiny ranges, range size is
unlikely to have been the most critical parameter affecting
extinction. The fact that all the other proboscids of the Americas
(other mammoths,
gomphotheres, and the
American mastodon), some of which
inhabited temperate or tropical
ecoregions, also went extinct at the end of the
Pleistocene (as part of a
mass extinction of
megafauna) suggests that the woolly
mammoth would have suffered the same fate even if its range had not
been reduced.
History of discovery

Illustration of the Adams Mammoth's
skeleton, 1815
Indigenous peoples of
Siberia had long found what are now known to be woolly mammoth
remains, collecting their tusks for the
ivory
trade. Native Siberians believed these remains to be those of giant
mole-like animals that lived
underground and died when burrowing to the surface. During the
1600s, reports of these finds would occasionally reach
Europe. Europeans generally interpreted the stories
based on
biblical accounts, as either the
remains of
behemoths or
giant.
The word "mammoth" first entered the English language during this same period,
derived from the local Russian
word for the
remains, mammant.
The first woolly mammoth remains studied by Western
science were examined by
British scientist
Hans
Sloane in 1728, and consisted of fossilized teeth and tusks
from Siberia. Publishing his findings, Sloane became the first to
recognize that the remains did not belong to giants or behemoths,
but rather to
elephants. Sloane turned to
another biblical explanation for the presence of elephants in the
Arctic: he believed that they had been buried during the biblical
Great Flood, and that Siberia had
previously been tropical prior to a drastic climate change. Others
interpreted Sloane's conclusion slightly differently, arguing that
the flood had carried elephants from the tropics to the
arctic.
It was
French scientist
Georges Cuvier who, in 1796, first identified
the woolly mammoth remains not as modern elephants transported to
the Arctic, but as an entirely new species. Most significantly, he
argued that this species had gone
extinct
and no longer existed, a concept that was not widely accepted at
the time. (See
Extinction section above). Following
Cuvier's identification,
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach gave
the woolly mammoth its scientific name in 1799,
Elephas
primigenius (placing it in the same
genus
as the
Indian elephant). It was not
until 1828 that
Joshua Brookes
recognized the species was distinct enough to warrant a new genus,
and reclassified it as
Mammuthus primigenius.
Meanwhile, woolly mammoth remains were also being unearthed for the
first time in
North America.
Mark
Catesby noted several large teeth dug up in North Carolina
in 1743, which African
slaves identified as the molars of an elephant. In 1806, William Clark (on a fossil-hunting expedition
ordered by President Thomas
Jefferson) collected several woolly mammoth specimens from
Kentucky
.
Interestingly, Jefferson (who famously had a keen interest in
paleontology) is also partially responsible for transforming the
word "mammoth" from a noun describing the prehistoric elephant to
an adjective describing anything amazingly large. The first
recorded use of the word as an adjective was in a description of a
large wheel of cheese given to Jefferson as a gift.
Frozen remains
While
frozen mammoth carcasses had been excavated by Westerners as early
as 1728 (by German scientist Daniel
Messerschmidt), the first mammoth fossil fully documented by modern
science was unearthed by a hunter in Siberia during 1799, on the
banks of the Lena
River
. The hunter allowed it to thaw (a process
taking several years) until he could retrieve the tusks for sale to
the ivory trade in Yakutsk
. He
then abandoned the specimen, allowing it to largely decay before
its recovery, possibly even having been partially devoured by
modern wolves.
In 1806, Russian botanist Mikhail Adams rescued what remained of
the specimen and brought it to the Zoological Museum of the Zoological
Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences
in St.
Petersburg
for
study. The specimen, which became known as the
Adams mammoth, was stuffed and mounted, and
continues to be on display at the Zoological Institute.
Preserved
frozen remains of woolly mammoths, with much soft tissue remaining, have been found in the
northern parts of Siberia
. This
is a rare occurrence, essentially requiring the animal to have been
buried rapidly in liquid or semi-solids such as silt, mud and icy
water which then froze. This may have occurred in a number of ways.
Mammoths may have been trapped in bogs or quicksands and either
died of starvation or exposure, or drowning if they sank under the
surface. The evidence of undigested food in the stomach and seed
pods still in the mouth of many of the specimens suggests that
neither starvation nor exposure are likely. The maturity of this
ingested vegetation places the time period in autumn rather than in
spring when flowers would be expected. The animals may have fallen
through ice into small ponds or potholes, entombing them. Many are
certainly known to have been killed in rivers, perhaps through
being swept away by river floods. In one location, by the Berelekh
River in
Yakutia in Siberia, more than 9,000
bones from at least 156 individual mammoths have been found in a
single spot, apparently having been swept there by the
current.

The preserved baby woolly mammoth
named Dima.
In 1977, the well-preserved carcass of a 7- to 8-month old baby
woolly mammoth, named "
Dima", was discovered.
This carcass was recovered from
permafrost on a tributary of the
Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia. This baby
woolly mammoth weighed approximately at death and was high and
long.
Radiocarbon dating
determined that Dima died about 40,000 years ago. Its internal
organs are similar to those of living elephants, but its ears are
only one-tenth the size of those of an African elephant of similar
age.
In the
summer of 1997, a Dolgan family named Jarkov
discovered a piece of mammoth tusk protruding from the tundra of
the Taymyr
Peninsula
in Siberia
, Russia
.
In
September/October 1999 this 20,380-year-old carcass and 25 tons of
surrounding sediment were transported by a Mi-26 heavy lift helicopter to an ice cave in Khatanga
, Taymyr Autonomous Okrug
. In October 2000, the careful defrosting
operations in this cave began with the use of
hairdryers to keep the hair and other soft tissues
intact.
In May 2007, the carcass of a six-month-old female woolly mammoth
calf named
Lyuba was discovered encased in a
layer of
permafrost near the
Yuribei River in Russia where it had been
buried for 37,000 years. Alexei Tikhonov, the Russian Academy of
Science's Zoological Institute's deputy director, has dismissed the
prospect of cloning the animal, as the whole cells required for
cloning would have burst under the freezing conditions: however,
DNA is expected to be well-preserved enough to
be useful for research on mammoth
phylogeny and perhaps
physiology.
By 1929, the remains of only thirty four mammoths with frozen soft
tissues (skin, flesh, or organs) had been documented. Only four of
them were relatively complete. Since then, about that many more
have been found. In most cases the flesh shows signs of decay
before its freezing and later desiccation. Stories abound about
frozen mammoth carcasses that were still edible once defrosted, but
the original sources indicate that the carcasses were in fact
terribly decayed, and the stench so unbearable that only the dogs
accompanying the finders, and wild scavengers, showed any interest
in the flesh.
In addition to frozen carcasses, large amounts of mammoth
ivory have been found in Siberia. Mammoth tusks have
been articles of trade for at least 2,000 years. They have been and
are still a highly prized commodity.
Güyük, the 13th century Khan of the Mongols,
is reputed to have sat on a throne made from mammoth ivory, and
even today it is in great demand as a replacement for the
now-banned export of elephant ivory.
Genetics
Since there is a known case in which an
Asian elephant and an
African elephant have produced a
live offspring, it has been theorized that if mammoths
were still alive today, they would be able to interbreed with
Indian elephants. This has led to the idea that perhaps a
mammoth-like beast could be recreated by taking genetic material
from a frozen mammoth and combining it with that from a modern
Indian elephant.

Section through an ivory tooth (tusk)
of a mammoth
Scientists hope to retrieve the preserved reproductive organs of a
frozen mammoth and revive its
sperm
cells. However, not enough genetic material has been found in
frozen mammoths for this to be attempted. Another attempt at
recreating the mammoth is cloning. Fox News reported that a team of
Japanese scientists feels they are getting closer to this goal. A
November 4, 2008 article states that the Japanese scientists were
successful in finding useful
DNA of mice that
had been frozen for 16 years. The scientists did so by looking in
the brain, where high concentrations of sugar had preserved the
DNA. They hope to use similar methods to find usable mammoth DNA
and implant it into unfertilized Asian elephant eggs.
In spite of not yet being able to retrieve this usable DNA, the
scientific community has been successful in determining the
complete
mitochondrial genome
sequence of
Mammuthus primigenius. The analysis
demonstrates that the divergence of mammoth, African elephant, and
Asian elephant occurred over a short time, and confirmed that the
mammoth was more closely related to the Asian than to the African
elephant. As an important landmark in this direction, in December
2005, a team of American, German, and UK researchers were able to
assemble a complete mitochondrial DNA of the mammoth, which allowed
them to trace the close evolutionary relationship between mammoths
and the Asian elephant. African elephants branched away from the
woolly mammoth around 6 million years ago, a moment in time close
to that of the similar split between chimps and humans. Many
researchers expect that the first fully sequenced nuclear genome of
an extinct species will be that of the mammoth.
On July 6 2006 it was reported that
scientists extracted, amplified and sequenced Mc1r,
a gene that influences hair colour in mammals,
from a 43,000-year old woolly mammoth bone from Siberia
.
In
November 2008 it was reported that two professors from Penn State
University
- Stephan Schuster, professor of biochemistry and
molecular biology, and Webb Miller, professor of biology, computer
science and engineering - had mapped much of the woolly mammoth's
DNA. Their research discovered that there were two distinct
groups of woolly mammoths, one which went extinct 45,000 years ago,
and a different one which went extinct in 10,000 B.C. Their
research also showed that the DNA of the woolly mammoth and the
African elephant are 98.55% to 99.4% identical.
While the authors admit they don't know the full size of the
genome, they believe they have sequenced about 50% from random
fragments.
The team mapped the mammoth's nuclear genome sequence by extracting
DNA from the hair follicle of a 20,000 year old mammoth retrieved
from
permafrost and from another mammoth
which died some 60,000 years ago. Using hair avoids the problems of
DNA contamination caused by bacteria and fungi. Hair follicles
preserve DNA because of the plastic-like protection afforded by the
hair material.
Cryptozoology
There
have been occasional claims that the woolly mammoth is not actually
extinct, and that small isolated herds might survive in the vast
and sparsely inhabited tundra of the northern
hemisphere
. In the late nineteenth century, there were,
according to Bengt Sjögren
(1962), persistent rumors about surviving mammoths hiding in
Alaska
.
In
October 1899, a story about a man named Henry Tukeman detailed his
having killed a mammoth in Alaska and that he subsequently donated
the specimen to the Smithsonian Institution
in Washington, D.C.
However, the museum denied the existence of
any mammoth corpse and the story turned out to be a hoax.
Sjögren
(1962) believes the myth was started when the American
biologist Charles Haskins Townsend traveled
in Alaska, saw Eskimos trading mammoth tusks,
asked if there still were living mammoths in Alaska and provided
them with a drawing of the animal.
In the
19th century, several reports of "large shaggy beasts" were passed
on to the Russian authorities by Siberian
tribesman, but no scientific proof ever
surfaced. A French
chargé d'affaires working in Vladivostok
, M. Gallon, claimed in 1946 that in 1920 he
met a Russian fur-trapper who claimed to have seen living giant,
furry "
elephants" deep into the
taiga. Gallon added that the fur-trapper didn't even
know about mammoths before, and that he talked about the mammoths
as a forest-animal at a time when they were seen as living on the
tundra and snow.
In legends
Legends from dozens of Native American tribes have been interpreted
by some as indicative of
Proboscidea.
One example is from
the Kaska tribe from northern British
Columbia
; in 1917 an ethnologist recorded their tradition
of: “A very large kind of animal which roamed the country a long
time ago. It corresponded somewhat to white men's pictures
of elephants. It was of huge size, in build like an elephant, had
tusks, and was hairy. These animals were seen not so very long ago,
it is said, generally singly; but none have been seen now for
several generations. Indians come across their bones occasionally.
The narrator said that he and some others, a few years ago, came on
a shoulder-blade... as wide as a table (about three feet).”
Popular misconceptions
Mammoths are among the most widely recognised prehistoric animals
and appear frequently in popular culture. They are most often
pictured living along side
dinosaurs in a
tropical rainforest, a common
misconception because mammoths actually lived on the
tundra in northern
Eurasia and
North America, although there were
also African mammoths -
Mammuthus
africanavus. They are also commonly mistaken for their distant
relatives
mastodons and this has led to
another misconception that the two creatures are the same animal,
which in fact, they were not.
References
- David R. Yesner, Douglas W. Veltre, Kristine J. Crossen, and
Russell W. Graham, “5,700-year-old Mammoth Remains from Qagnax
Cave, Pribilof Islands, Alaska”, Second World of Elephants
Congress, (Hot Springs: Mammoth Site, 2005), 200-203.
- Kristine J. Crossen, “5,700-Year-Old Mammoth Remains from the
Pribilof Islands, Alaska: Last Outpost of North America Megafauna”,
Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs, Volume 37,
Number 7, (Geological Society of America, 2005), 463.
- Breyne, J.P. (1741). "Observations, and a Description of Some
Mammoth's Bones Dug Up in Siberia, Proving Them to Have Belonged to
Elephants." Philosophical Transactions,
40(1737-1738): 124-139.
- Simpson, J. (2009). " Word Stories: Mammoth." Oxford English Dictionary
Online, Oxford University Press. Accessed 05-JUN-2009.
- Cuvier, G. (1796). "Mémoire sur les épèces d'elephans tant
vivantes que fossils, lu à la séance publique de l'Institut
National le 15 germinal, an IV." Magasin encyclopédique, 2e
anée, 3: 440-445. [In French].
- National Geographic photo gallery.
- E. W. Pfizenmayer was one of the scientists who recovered and
studied a mammoth that was found at the river Berezovka in the
early 1900s. He wrote: “Its death must have occurred very
quickly after its fall, for we found half-chewed food still in its
mouth, between the back teeth and on its tongue, which was in good
preservation. The food consisted of leaves and grasses, some of the
latter carrying seeds. We could tell from these that the mammoth
must have come to its miserable end in the autumn.” See
- tripatlas.com - Web page cites dead link; info
attributed to 'Harington, C.R. (1995). Woolly mammoth. Beringian
Research Notes No. 2, Yukon Tourism, 4 p.'
- Archive.org- cache of Harington, C.R. (1995).
Assoc. with Canadian Museum of Nature
- Harington, C.R. (1995). Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre -
Woolly Mammoth. Retrieved from
http://www.beringia.com/research/woolly_mammoth.html
- Mol, D. et al. (2001). The Jarkov Mammoth: 20,000-Year-Old
carcass of a Siberian woolly mammoth Mammuthus primigenius
(Blumenbach, 1799). The World of Elephants, Proceedings of the 1st
International Congress (October 16-20 2001, Rome): 305-309.
Full text pdf
- Metagenomics to paleogenomics: Large-scale
sequencing of mammoth DNA
- Will findings recreate the woolly mammoth?,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 20, 2008
- Cosmos Online - Mammoth Genome Cracked: Key to Cloning?
(http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/2346/mammoth-genome-cracked-key-cloning)
- Science Daily
- Sjögren, Bengt. Farliga djur och djur som inte finns, Prisma,
1962
- William Berryman Scott, “American Elephant Myths”, Scribner’s
Magazine, Volume 1, (New York, C. Scribner’s Sons, 1887), 474-476,
retrieved online October 2008 at
www.archive.org/details/scribnersmag01editmiss.
- Records of the Past Exploration Society, “Pre-Indian
Inhabitants of North America, Part II, Man and the Elephant and
Mastodon”, Records of the Past, (Washington D.C.: Records of the
Past Exploration Society, 1907), 164, retrieved online October 2008
at books.google.com/books?id=7_HzBYM-7X4C
- George E. Lankford, “Pleistocene Animals in Folk Memory”, The
Journal of American Folklore, Volume 93, Number 369, (Champaign:
University of Illinois, 1980), 293-304.
- James A. Teit, "Kaska Tales", The Journal of American Folk-Lore,
Volume 30, Number 68, (Lancaster: New Era Printing, 1917),
450-451.
- Examples of British Columbia Folklore: Bladder-Head Boy (A Kaska Woolly-Mammoth Legend), (The
British Columbia Folklore Society, 2003).
External links