What is Mammoth ?

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Mammoth, (genus Mammuthus), any member of an extinct group of elephants found as fossils in Pleistocene deposits over every continent except Australia and South America and in early Holocene deposits of North America

(The Pleistocene Epoch began 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago. The Holocene Epoch began 11,700 years ago and continues through the present.)

The relative abundance and, at times, excellent preservation of this species’s carcasses found in the permanently frozen ground of Siberia has provided much information about mammoths’ structure and habits.

Scientific evidence suggests that small populations of woolly mammoths may have survived in North America until between 10,500 and 7,600 years ago.

An examination of a fossil tooth discovered in 2015 indicated that a tiny population of mammoths persisted on Wrangel Island, an Arctic island located off the coast of northern Russia, as late as 4,300 years ago before succumbing to extinction from the effects of inbreeding and the loss of genetic diversity.

Mammoths figured significantly in the art of primitive humans; cave dwellers in Europe realistically depicted herds of these animals.

Mammoths were sometimes trapped in ice crevasses and covered over; they were frozen, and their bodies were remarkably well preserved. In fact, cases have been reported in which sled dogs actually were fed the meat from frozen mammoth carcasses that had begun to thaw out of the ice that had held them for almost 30,000 years.

Most mammoths were about as large as modern elephants.

The North American imperial mammoth (M. imperator) attained a shoulder height of 4 metres (14 feet). At the other extreme were certain dwarfed forms whose ancestors became isolated on various islands.

Many mammoths had a woolly, yellowish brown undercoat about 2.5 cm (1 inch) thick beneath a coarser outer covering of dark brown hair up to 50 cm (20 inches) long.

Mammoth dentition was made up of alternating plates of enamel and a denture that often became worn down by constant back-to-front chewing motions.

It is clear that the mammoth was hunted by early North American hunters.

The ears of a woolly mammoth were shorter than the modern elephant’s ears. Like their thick coat of fur, their shortened ears were an important cold-weather adaptation because it minimized frostbite and heatloss.

Scientists 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

The woolly mammoth was not the only “woolly” type of animal. The woolly rhinoceros, also known as the Coelodonta, co-existed with the woolly mammoth, walking the Earth during the Pleistocene epoch.

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 that date back to the Upper Paleolithic period.

Today, the hunt is on for woolly mammoth tusks in the Arctic Siberia. Due to global warming, the melting permafrost has begun revealing these hidden ivory treasures for a group of local tusk-hunters to find and sell.

The first fully documented woolly mammoth skeleton was discovered in 1799.

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 color, however researchers believe the pigment was changed because of prolonged burial in the ground.

In September 2012 in Russia, an 11-year-old boy named Yevgeny “Zhenya” Salinder happened upon an extremely well-preserved woolly mammoth carcass while walking his dogs.

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 500-1000 woolly mammoths lived on Wrangel Island until 1650 BC.

Woolly mammoths were closely related to today's Asian elephants. They looked a lot like their modern cousins, except for one major difference.

Though woolly mammoths went extinct around 10,000 years ago, humans know quite a bit about them because of where they lived.

The permafrost of the Arctic preserved many woolly mammoth bodies almost intact. When the ground around riverbanks and streams erodes, it often reveals the corpse of a long-dead mammoth that looks much like it did when it died.