A frozen 37,000-year-old baby mammoth unearthed in May by a reindeer herder in northern Siberia's remote Yamal-Nenets region, has arrived in Japan on Saturday for tests that researchers hope will shed new light on the ancient animals. The mammoth carcass is to be sent to Tokyo's Jikei Medical University, where it will undergo a computed tomography scan to provide information about the animal's organs and internal structure. The images and results will be available to the public on January 4th 2008.
Scientists studying the remains of mammoths have found evidence that the animals and other great beasts were blasted with material that came from space. Eight tusks unearthed in Alaska suggest the animals were hit by fast-flying meteorite fragments during a calamitous event some 35,000 years ago
When Daisy the dachshund bounds along the shoreline, she often picks up a stick or a dead fish to gnaw on. But going walkies the other day, she briefly found herself in doggie heaven ... when she was confronted by a bone as big as herself. However, this was no meaty treat - just a prehistoric prize. For Daisy had discovered a fossilised mammoth bone up to two million years old. Read more
David Boyers was standing in about two feet of water in the South Fork of the Licking River when he saw what appeared to be a funny-looking log. The log's unusual shape looked enough like a bone - the kind a giant dog might chew on - that Boyers decided to keep it. So he threw it in his canoe and then in the back of his truck. But when he examined the dried-out find more closely a few days later, he decided the inside of it looked suspiciously like bone marrow. Read more
Ten woolly mammoths that died up to 50,000 years ago have had their DNA sequenced using a technique that could revolutionise genetic testing of extinct creatures. DNA sequences from mammoth remains were so detailed that they are expected to cast light on why the animals became extinct. Using a new technique for extracting DNA, researchers were able to carry out the analysis with strands of hair instead of fragments of bone. The woolly mammoth hair had been so well preserved that it provided the most accurate DNA sequencing of the extinct animals yet achieved. One of the animals used in the study dated back 50,000 years and its hairs allowed scientists to obtain the oldest complete sequence of mitochondrial DNA.
That is partly because it flies in the face of recent research suggesting that North America's big mammals were hunted to extinction by early humans, but mainly because the paper argues that the comet's impact triggered a planetwide big chill - the so-called Younger Dryas cooldown - that lasted 1,000 years.
"This is fascinating research when it comes to the mass extinctions. They really seem on to something. I can imagine this sort of impact causing a cooldown of five years or 10 years, but 1,000 years - well, I'm skeptical. I don't think they have given good evidence for that" - Jeffrey Severinghaus, a geochemist and expert in prehistoric climatology with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.
Prehistoric bones are not hard to find in the northernmost reaches of Siberia. The permafrost is thawing so rapidly that in some places in the tundra, the bones of lions, mammoths and woolly rhinos poke out through the soil every few metres.
University of Michigan palaeontologist Daniel Fisher just returned from Siberia where he spent a week as part of a six-member international team that examined the frozen, nearly intact remains of a 4-month-old female woolly mammoth. Samples will be sent to Fisher's Ann Arbor laboratories for analysis.
"It's the best and most complete mammoth carcassbaby or adultever found" - Daniel Fisher, curator of palaeontology at the U-M Museum of Palaeontology.
An analysis of genetic material painstakingly retrieved from an ancient mastodon tooth has pushed back the date that mammoths diverged from elephants by about 2 million years. The finding pegs the mammoth and elephant split to sometime around 6 million to 7 million years ago, when humans and our primate relatives may have last shared a common ancestor. Researchers say this makes it more likely that environmental changes at the time caused a massive period of speciation in Africa. Until recently, scientists believed that humans and chimps last shared a common ancestor about 5 million years ago, says Paul Matheus at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, US. But he adds that fossil studies and genetic discoveries in recent years have pushed this date back by at least 1 million years.
The remains of a prehistoric mastodon - a mammoth-like animal - have been found in northern Greece, including intact long tusks. A Dutch scientist at the site, Dick Mol, says the find near Grevena should help explain why mastodons died out in Europe two to three million years ago. The mastodon's tusks measure 5m and 4m. They are the longest tusks ever found on a prehistoric elephant-like animal.