What is Mammoth ?

For example, in 2007 in Siberia, a pair of mummified baby mammoths were found. The bodies were so well preserved that CT scans found the mammoths died from choking on mud 40,000 years ago.

The mud was like a "really thick batter that they got clogged in their trachea and they were unable to dislodge by coughing," said study co-author Daniel Fisher, the director of the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology.

Botanist Mikhail Ivanovich Adams recovered the first Siberian woolly mammoth fossils in 1806. Over a dozen soft-tissue specimens have been found since then.

Woolly mammoths were around 13 feet (4 meters) tall and weighed around 6 tons (5.44 metric tons), according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature(IUCN).

Though woolly mammoths are known for living in the frigid planes of the Arctic, mammoths actually arrived there from a much warmer home.

Research by a team from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, found that the ancestors of both the mammoth and Asian elephant originated in Africa 6.7 million to 7 million years ago.

The woolly mammoth’s survival in much colder climates is credited by the research team to small genetic mutations that may have changed the way oxygen was delivered by its blood that could have kept them warmer.

Because many mammoth corpses are so well preserved, scientist have been able to extract DNA from the animals. One particularly good specimen was a female mammoth in her 50s, nicknamed Buttercup, that lived about 40,000 years ago.

In theory, this DNA could be used to clone woolly mammoths, bringing them back from extinction. In fact, there is a project called The Woolly Mammoth Revival that is working toward making this idea a reality.

This concept is highly contested in the scientific world. Some objections are that the mammoth’s habitat isn’t what it was when the creature roamed the Earth, so where would it live?

Another concern is how microbes have changed in the 10,000 years since woolly mammoths have roamed the Earth.

. Animals rely on microbes to help digest food. If the mammoth’s microbes went extinct, the animal may suffer if brought back. "In many cases, the overall phenotypes [physical appearance] of organisms and their ability to digest food is directly tied to the microorganisms in them," said Susan Perkins, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History.

So far, Harvard geneticist George Church and colleagues have used a gene-editing technique to insert mammoth genes into the DNA of elephant skin cells.

This is far from cloning mammoths, but it is a first step to manipulating the DNA found in mammoth corpses.

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 (M. trogontherii) was perhaps the largest one in the family — growing up to 13 to 15 feet tall.

Like their thick coat of fur, their shortened ears were an important cold-weather adaptation because it minimized frostbite and heatloss.

Besides their long, shaggy coats, Woolly Mammoths are famous for their extra-long tusks, which measured up to 15 feet on the biggest males.

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 more during favorable conditions.
.

The woolly rhinoceros, also known as the Coelodonta, co-existed with the woolly mammoth, walking the Earth during the Pleistocene epoch. Like the woolly mammoth, the woolly rhino adapted to the cold with a furry coat, was depicted by human ancestors in cave paintings and became extinct around the same time.

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. There is also evidence of the use of bones and tusks by humans to create portable art objects, shelters, tools, furniture and even burials.

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. A tusk can range from 10-13 foot in length and a top-grade mammoth tusk is worth around $400 per pound. Mammoth ivory, unlike elephant ivory, is legal.

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 of 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.

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.