Mammoths: Out Of The Past & On The Horizon

Talking about cloning mammoths is just a shaggy elephant story
 
Kondoru said:
Oh, no its shed red hairs all over the floor!
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No! Strawberry blond!

Mammoths killed by lions taken by people, find suggests

[article]

Woolly Mammoth: Secrets from the Ice is on BBC Two at 21:00 BST on Wednesday 4 April and will be shown on the Discovery Channel in the US at a future date.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/17525070
 
All in all I found the article more interesting than the programme.

Well worth clicking on the Eurasian cave lions link there to see the cave drawings of them.
 
Mammoths didn't go out with a bang
http://www.nature.com/news/mammoths-did ... ng-1.10820
Study suggests Beringia’s shaggy behemoths went extinct after a slow and gradual decline.

Brian Switek
12 June 2012
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Why are there no more woolly mammoths? The last isolated island populations of these huge beasts disappeared about 4,000 years ago — well after the Pleistocene extinction that wiped out much of the world’s megafauna — but what triggered their demise remains a frustrating mystery. According to the latest study to contribute to the ongoing debate, the last mammoths disappeared after a long, slow decline in numbers rather than because of a single cause.


The various ages and locations of woolly mammoth bones reveal that they went extinct over a long period of time rather than all at once.
TOM BEAN/ALAMY
Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) once roamed over cold, dry grasslands in the Northern Hemisphere called mammoth steppe. Their remains are especially common in Beringia, the bridge of land that connects eastern Russia and western Alaska. Now, palaeoecologist Glen MacDonald at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues have tracked the pattern of the Beringian mammoth’s extinction. Their results are published today in Nature Communications1.

MacDonald and his colleagues combined a geographical database of mammoth finds with radiocarbon dates for mammoth specimens, prehistoric plants and archaeological sites to follow how woolly mammoth ranges expanded and contracted during the past 45,000 years.

The team found that woolly mammoth populations waxed and waned as the cold climate of the Pleistocene gave way to a warmer, wetter one. Between the time of the oldest mammoths in the study and the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, around 20,000 years ago, northern populations of mammoths declined while populations in Siberia’s interior increased.

Then, following the Younger Dryas period around 11,500 years ago, woolly mammoths became concentrated in the north and some were isolated on islands before a warmer climate replaced the mammoth steppe with conifer forests, peat bogs and birch shrubland. The island mammoths were the last holdout of a gradual extinction that had already taken place on the mainland, the authors say.

No single cause
“No one event can be blamed for the extinction,” MacDonald explains. Climate change drastically altered the mammoths' habitats, causing their populations to shrink. Prehistoric humans who were moving through Beringia at the time might also have played a part by hunting the remaining mammoths. That suggestion is backed up by a previous study showing that human predators could have hastened the extinction of slow-breeding mammoths that were already weakened by environmental change2.

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Palaeontologist Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, isn’t so sure about the details of MacDonald’s pattern of mammoth decline. Some of the Russian samples analysed by the team, he points out, were dated using old techniques and need to be reinvestigated.

Nevertheless, MacPhee notes that the study fits the general picture that mammoths “died out over an appreciable period” and that the extended interaction between mammoths and humans means that “‘Blitzkrieg’-style explanations for end-Pleistocene extinction are increasingly hard to accept”. The idea that multiple factors caused the extinction is attractive, MacPhee says, but “how to bind them all together in a comprehensible narrative is no mean task”.

MacDonald agrees, saying that “the take-home message for mammoth extinction is 'it’s complicated'.” But the mammoths' slow decline could be a preview of what is to come for modern species. “The issues the mammoths faced of climate change, huge habitat change and human pressure,” MacDonald notes, “are exactly what species are facing in the twenty-first century.” The major difference, he says, “is that all these things are happening at a greatly accelerated rate compared to what the mammoths faced”.

Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2012.10820

References

MacDonald, G. M. et al. Nature Commun. 3, 893 (2012).
Article
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Nogués-Bravo, D., Rodríguez, J., Hortal, J., Batra, P. & Araújo, M. B. PLoS Biology 6, e79 (2008).
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Related stories and links
From nature.com
Mini mammoth once roamed Crete
09 May 2012
Ancient migration: Coming to America
02 May 2012
Early humans linked to large-carnivore extinctions
26 April 2012
Palaeoecology: What killed the big beasts?
14 March 2012
Secrets of a mastodon graveyard
08 November 2011
Mastodon fossil throws up questions over 'rapid' extinction
20 October 2011

From elsewhere

Glen MacDonald
Ross MacPhee
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New hope for Mammoth cloning.

Russian mammoth remains give glimmer of hope for cloning
http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/bre88b ... a-mammoth/
By Nastassia AstrasheuskayaPosted 2012/09/14 at 12:11 pm EDT

MOSCOW, Sep. 14, 2012 (Reuters) — Scientists who found well preserved woolly mammoth remains in a remote part of Russia hope they might contain the necessary material to clone the long extinct beast.


A child walks near a sculpture displaying a mammoth during sunset on the outskirts of Khanty-Mansiysk, March 4, 2011. REUTERS/Tatyana Makeyeva

The Russian-led international team found the remains, including fur and bone marrow, with some cell nuclei intact, in the Ust-Yansk area of the Yakutia region on Russia's Arctic coast.

The next step will be to search for living cells among the material which was preserved in the Siberian permafrost, said the Russian scientist who led the expedition with members from the United States, Canada, South Korea, Sweden and Great Britain.

"All we need for cloning is one living cell, which means it can reproduce autonomously. Then it will be no problem for us to multiply them to tens of thousands cells," said Semyon Grigoryev, a professor at North-East Federal University (NEFU).

However, media reports that the scientists were close to making a "Jurassic Park"-style breakthrough by bringing the giant mammal back to life after thousands of years of extinction, were exaggerated.

"We are counting on our region's permafrost to have kept some cells alive. But it is unlikely," said Grigoryev, pointing out that the remains would need to have been at a stable temperature between -4 and -20 Celsius (between 28 and -4 Fahrenheit) for any cells to remain alive.

Some media had reported that living cells had been discovered, but Grigoryev said that had been due to a translation error as the word "intact" had been translated from English into Russian as "living".

"What we have found are intact cells, with a whole nucleus," he said, adding that living cells, if found, would provide the necessary samples to make a living clone.

The Yana 2012 expedition found the remains last week at the depth of 5-6 meters (16-20 feet) in a tunnel dug by locals searching for rare and valuable mammoth bone.

A previous find, discovered in the same region two years ago, yielded the remains of a 40,000-year-old female baby woolly mammoth, named Yuka by scientists, as well as those of an ancient bison and horse. Those finds lacked living cells.

To determine whether the cells are living, they will be examined by a South Korean scientist, Hwang Woo Suk, whose Sooam Biotech has done several animal clonings, including the world's first commercial dog cloning.

Scientists have made several attempts to revive mammoths using cells of remains since 1990s, none of them successful.

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
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This may be the same mammoth as described in the previous post but gives the info that it was discovered by an 11 year old boy. I bet he had his dog with him.

Mammoth carcass found in Siberia
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19848109

The carcass, discovered on Russia's Taimyr Peninsula, still has one of its tusks

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A well-preserved mammoth carcass has been found by an 11-year-old boy in the permafrost of northern Siberia.

The remains were discovered at the end of August in Sopochnaya Karga, 3,500km (2,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.

A team of experts from St Petersburg then spent five days in September extracting the body from frozen mud.

The mammoth is estimated to have been around 16 years old when it died; it stood 2m tall and weighed 500kg.

It has been named Zhenya, after Zhenya Salinder, the 11-year-old who found the carcass while walking his dogs in the area.

Alexei Tikhonov, from the St Petersburg Zoology Institute, who led the team excavating the mammoth, said this specimen could either have been killed by Ice Age humans, or by a rival mammoth.

He added that it was well preserved for an adult specimen.

His colleague Sergei Gorbunov, from the International Mammoth Committee, which works to recover and safeguard such remains, said: "We had to use both traditional instruments such as axes, picks, shovels as well as such devices as this "steamer" which allowed us to thaw a thin layer of permafrost.

"Then we cleaned it off, and then we melted more of it. It took us a week to complete this task."

But several juvenile examples have come to light that are more complete.

Earlier this year, a very well preserved juvenile mammoth nicknamed Yuka was unveiled by scientists.

Found in the Yakutia region of Russia, it preserves much of its soft tissue and strawberry-blonde coat of hair. There were also signs from its remains that humans may have stolen the carcass from lions and perhaps even stashed it for eating at a later date.
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ramonmercado said:
This may be the same mammoth as described in the previous post but gives the info that it was discovered by an 11 year old boy. I bet he had his dog with him.
Click to expand...
The article you quote says "the 11-year-old who found the carcass while walking his dogs in the area. " ;)
 
kamalktk said:
ramonmercado said:
This may be the same mammoth as described in the previous post but gives the info that it was discovered by an 11 year old boy. I bet he had his dog with him.
Click to expand...
The article you quote says "the 11-year-old who found the carcass while walking his dogs in the area. " ;)
Click to expand...

How did I miss that sentence? You added it in! You're a secret mod!
 
“Impeccably preserved” woolly mammoth excavated in France

The nearly complete skeleton was found with neanderthal-made spearheads among bones

Archaeologists near Paris Thursday excavated a nearly complete woolly mammoth skeleton. The long-dead mammoth, named “Helmut,” is considered remarkable not simply because it is “impeccably preserved” but also because neanderthal-made spearheads were discovered among the bones.

As Salon noted in October following the accidental discovery by a Russian boy of a mammoth carcass, “such discoveries fuel ongoing interest in cloning a mammoth.” Scientists in South Korea, Russia and Japan are already working on mammoth cloning projects using stem cells.

The video below gives more details on this latest French discovery:
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Source: http://www.salon.com/2012/11/08/impecca ... in_france/
 
Extinct elephant 'survived late' in North China

By Michelle Warwicker Reporter, BBC Nature

Wild elephants living in North China 3,000 years ago belonged to the extinct genus Palaeoloxodon, scientists say.

They had previously been identified as Elephas maximus, the Asian elephant that still inhabits southern China.

The findings suggest that Palaeloxodon survived a further 7,000 years than was thought.

The team from China examined fossilised elephant teeth and ancient elephant-shaped bronzes for the study.

The research, published in Quaternary International was carried out by a group of scientists from Shaanxi Normal University and Northwest University in Xi'an and The Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Beijing.

No wild elephants live in North China today, but historical documents indicate that they roamed freely 3,000 years ago.

For decades experts believed that the ancient elephants were E. maximus - a species adapted to a tropical climate and that is still found in China's southerly Yunnan province.

"They thought North China was controlled by tropical climate at that time," explained Ji Li, from Shaanxi Normal University, who collaborated on the study with colleagues professor Yongjian Hou, professor Yongxiang Li and Jie Zhang.

But later research into China's climate history indicates that 3,000 years ago most parts of North China were still controlled by the warm temperate climate zone, and not the subtropic zone.

This discovery would mean that "the air temperature of North China 3,000 years ago was still not high enough for Elephas to live," said Mr Li.

"The species of the elephants is not only a problem of zoology, but also a problem about global climate change," he added.

Palaeoloxodon was thought to have disappeared from its last stronghold in China just before the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary, around 10,000 years ago.

To investigate whether these mammals continued to live beyond the Pleistocene epoch and into the Holocene (the current geological epoch), the team re-examined fossilised elephant teeth discovered in Holocene layers of rock in North China during the 1900s.

Earlier scientists had identified these fossils as remains of E. maximus. But Mr Li's team concluded the molars and tusks were more like those of the straight-tusked Palaeoloxodon:

"The tusks of Palaeoloxodon are thicker, stronger and longer than [those of] E. maximus", he explained, whereas E. maximus's tusks are "more incurvate".

Ancient treasures

The team also examined dozens of ancient elephant-shaped bronze wares from the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties (around 4,100-2,300 years ago) after Mr Li noticed the trunks on the ornaments didn't resemble those of E. maximus.

Elephants can either have one or two of "fingers" on the tip of their trunk, used for grasping objects.

The 33 elephant bronzes exhumed from different sites in North China all depicted elephants with two "fingers" on their trunks, while E. maximus (Asian elephant) has just one "finger".

Whether Palaeoloxodon had one or two fingers on its trunk is not known. "However, on the trunk of E. maximus, there cannot be two fingers," writes Mr Li in the study.

The age of these elephant-shaped bronzes supports the researchers' theory that Palaeoloxodon did not become extinct until thousands of years later than thought.

Their findings correlate with other recent paleontological discoveries that further large mammal species, thought to have died out at the end of the Pleistocene, actually lasted in to the Holocene.

These include the woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis), woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) and the aurochs (Bos primigenius).

Such discoveries suggest that the extinction period of many Pleistocene land mammals may have lasted longer than was previously thought.

SOURCE: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/20678793
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Rare mammoth tooth found on Seatown beach
By Tara Cox, 5:30am Thursday 10th April 2014

A HOLIDAYMAKER discovered a rare mammoth tooth fossil on a Dorset beach.
Chris Gasson, 35, from Eastbourne, was spending a week-long holiday in Chideock with his wife Kerry and six-week-old baby Mabel when he visited Seatown beach to do some fishing.
The builder found the tooth just below the tide line, first dismissing it as part of an oyster shell.

The mammoth tooth, which is estimated to be between 12,000 and 15,000 years old, measures 80mm wide by 150mm tall.
Mr Gasson said: “I just stumbled across it when I was going fishing.
“When I first saw it I thought it was just a fossil, but I took it back to the bed and breakfast we were stopping at in Chideock, and the owner told me to take it to local museums because she thought it was a mammoth tooth.

“I took it to the palaeontologist in Charmouth and he confirmed it as one.
“It was a bit of a shock really, I know they are not found here often so it took me by surprise.
“I don’t have any real plans for it at the moment, I think I’ll just put it in a glass case on my mantelpiece or maybe donate it to the Charmouth heritage centre.”

Paddy Howe, geologist at Lyme Regis Museum, said he has been working as a geologist for 12 years and this discovery marks the first one he has ever heard of in Dorset.
He added: “This find is incredibly uncommon for West Dorset, I am aware that a mammoth tooth was found in Devon recently.
“The tooth is estimated to be 15,000 years old, which is a lot younger than the 200 million year old fossils we usually find – but the find is incredibly rare.”

Palaeontologist at Charmouth Heritage Centre Phil Davidson, identified the find as a mammoth tooth but said complete confirmation will come from experts at the Natural History Museum.
He added: “It was certainly a very rare find, the last time someone brought in a similar item to the centre was more than 20 years ago.
“The find will also be recorded on the West Dorset fossil collecting code which keeps a record of all the rare items found in the area.”

http://www.dorsetecho.co.uk/news/111379 ... own_beach/

This area is part of the Jurassic Coast:
The Dorset and East Devon Coast World Heritage Site covers 3 geological time periods; the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous. These are showcased in the 3 rock types found along the coast.

http://jurassiccoast.org/
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The youngest of these, the Cretaceous, lasted until 65 million years ago.
So what's a pesky mammoth doing there! Have we got to rewrite the text-books?

On a Fortean note, this is the second time this week that Seatown has been in the news. I thought I knew Dorset quite well, but I had to look up Seatown on a map, thinking it was a typo for Seaton, which is in Devon, and also part of the Jurassic Coast.

(The earlier story from Seatown was about a vicar who drowned in a rowing boat accident, reported on the Lone CG thread;
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewt ... 57#1410157 )
 
Two CT-scanned Siberian mammoth calves yield trove of insights

A photograph of Lyuba’s external appearance prior to any internal examination.Credit: Francis Latreille
(Phys.org) —CT scans of two newborn woolly mammoths recovered from the Siberian Arctic are revealing previously inaccessible details about the early development of prehistoric pachyderms. In addition, the X-ray images show that both creatures died from suffocation after inhaling mud.

Lyuba and Khroma, who died at ages 1 and 2 months, respectively, are the most complete and best-preserved baby mammoth specimens ever found. Lyuba's full-body CT scan, which used an industrial scanner at a Ford testing facility in Michigan, was the first of its kind for any mammoth.

"This is the first time anyone's been able to do a comparative study of the skeletal development of two baby mammoths of known age," said University of Michigan paleontologist Daniel Fisher.

"This allowed us to document the changes that occur as the mammoth body develops," Fisher said. "And since they are both essentially complete skeletons, they can be thought of as Rosetta Stones that will help us interpret all the isolated baby mammoth bones that show up at other localities."

Fisher, director of the U-M Museum of Paleontology, is lead author of a paper published online July 8 in a special issue of the Journal of Paleontology. The paper provides a detailed discussion of the findings from the Lyuba and Khroma CT scans and includes about 30 previously unpublished CT images.

The paper's 10 authors are from the United States, Russia and France. They include three recent U-M graduates and a collections manager at the U-M paleontology museum.

Lyuba and Khroma lived more than 40,000 years ago and belonged to mammoth populations separated by roughly 3,000 miles. Lyuba was found by reindeer herders in May 2007 on the banks of the Yuribei River on the Yamal Peninsula, in northwest Siberia. She was found frozen and partially dehydrated but otherwise appeared to be intact, except for the loss of most of her hair and all of her nails.

Khroma was found in October 2008 near the Khroma River in northernmost Yakutia, in northeast Siberia. She was frozen in permafrost in an upright position. Ravens and possibly arctic foxes scavenged exposed portions of her carcass, including parts of the trunk and skull and the fat hump that likely covered the back of her neck. Otherwise, the body was recovered in good condition. ...

http://phys.org/news/2014-07-ct-scanned ... yield.html
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Buy your own mammoth!

Tuesday 23rd September 2014 Last updated at 12:09
Woolly mammoth skeleton may fetch £250,000 at auction.

An almost-complete skeleton of an ice-age woolly mammoth is to be sold at auction.
It's male, 3.5 meters high and 5.5 meters long. It lived about 10,000 years ago in the grasslands sweeping from North America to Europe and Asia.
It would have been covered in long fur, but has smaller ears and a shorter tail than elephants now.
It weighed more than six tonnes - that's the same as three cars.

Museums around the world and private collectors are expected to place bids at the sale at Summers Place Auctions in West Sussex on November 26th.
Director Rupert van Der Werff, 'It's exceptional - it's more or less complete with two magnificent tusks. There are one or two toes missing. The inside curve of the tusks is about 2.4 metres long.''
It's very rare and was owned by a collector in Eastern Europe. There are so many bones it's only just been managed to be put back together

It's thought the massive bones could fetch up to $400,000 which is about £250,000 pounds.
Last year a diplodocus skeleton sold at auction for more than £400,000 ($654,000).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/29327498
 
Will woolly mammoths stride the Siberian plains once again? DNA samples from an exceptionally well preserved extinct Mammuthus, found in the snowy wastes of Siberia, have raised the prospect of cloning. But scientists are divided about raising the species from the dead, 10,000 years after becoming extinct.

Russian scientists were amazed at the condition of the mammoth, found embedded in a chunk of ice on a remote Siberian island. The samples were so well preserved that fresh blood was found within muscle tissue. The team used carbon dating techniques to reveal the animal had walked the Earth around 40,000 years ago and raised hopes that it could be cloned.

Nicknamed Buttercup, the adult female was discovered in May 2013. At 2.5 metres tall, she is not much larger than an Asian elephant. Incredibly, three legs, most of her body, some of her head and her trunk had survived. She was in her fifties when she became trapped in a peat bog and was eaten by predators, scientists believe.

A Channel 4 film, to be shown next weekend, follows Buttercup's autopsy in Siberia, and the extraction of high-quality DNA and cells for future use by Sooam, a South Korean biotech company. ...

'Woolly Mammoth: The Autopsy' is on Channel 4 at 8pm on 23 November

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 63415.html
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Woolly mammoth skeleton unearthed by Michigan farmers
3 October 2015 Last updated at 20:58 BST

Two farmers in Michigan made an astonishing discovery when they unearthed the remains of a woolly mammoth while digging in a soybean field.

Experts say it is one of the most complete sets ever found in the state.
University of Michigan researchers say there is evidence the mammoth lived 11,700-15,000 years ago.

Video courtesy of Reuters.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34435161
 
Chemical clues about weaning age embedded in the tusks of juvenile Siberian woolly mammoths suggest that hunting, rather than climate change, was the primary cause of the elephant-like animal's extinction.

Woolly mammoths disappeared from Siberia and North America about 10,000 years ago, along with other giant mammals that went extinct at the end of the last glacial period. Current competing hypotheses for the mammoth's extinction point to human hunting or climate change, possibly combining in a deadly one-two punch.

Despite decades of study, the issue remains unresolved and hotly debated. But two University of Michigan paleontologists may have found an ingenious way around the logjam.

U-M doctoral student Michael Cherney and his adviser, Museum of Paleontology Director Daniel Fisher, say an isotopic signature in 15 tusks from juvenile Siberian woolly mammoths suggests that the weaning age, which is the time when a calf stops nursing, decreased by about three years over a span of roughly 30,000 years leading up to the woolly mammoth's extinction.

Climate-related nutritional stress is associated with delayed weaning in modern elephants, while hunting pressure is known to accelerate maturation in animals and would likely result in earlier weaning, according to Cherney and Fisher.

http://phys.org/print364120214.html
 
Remains of a mammoth uncovered near Mexico City

Mexican experts say they are completing work on digging up fossilised bones of a mammoth found near Mexico City.
They were found near the village of Tultepec while drains were being installed.
The bones are believed to be about 14,000 years old and were scattered, suggesting the mammoth had been cut up by humans for its meat and pelt.
Other remains have been found in the area which had been a shallow lake where the heavy mammoths got stuck.

Luis Cordoba, an archaeologist with the National Institute of Anthropology and History told French news agency AFP that the remains of more than 50 mammoths had been discovered in the area around the capital, Mexico City.
He said the Tultepec mammoth had been found 2m beneath a street in the village.
He said when alive it had been between the ages of 20 and 25, and the skeleton was almost complete and well-preserved with tusks still attached to its skull.

Scientists hope to eventually assemble the fossils and put them on display.
Mammoth remains have been discovered in several regions of Mexico, in areas near lakes where herds congregated.
Known as the Columbian Mammoth, they were a sub-species which lived across the United States and Central America.
Remains of the mammoths have been uncovered across Mexico, Texas and as far west as the La Brea Tar Pits in California.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-36631474
 
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