* Astronomy

A baby mammoth unearthed in the permafrost of north-west Siberia could be the best preserved specimen of its type, scientists have said.
The frozen carcass is to be sent to Japan for detailed study.
The six-month-old female calf was discovered on the Yamal peninsula of Russia and is thought to have died 10,000 years ago.
The animal's trunk and eyes are still intact and some of its fur remains on the body.

Read more

A Wyoming museum is seeking volunteers to help excavate the remains of a mammoth that may be one of the largest and most complete ever discovered in the state.
Scientists with the Tate Geological Museum at Casper College last year uncovered approximately 120 bones from a mammoth estimated to be up to 2 million years old at a site outside of Douglas.
Museum Director Dave Brown said several important bones have yet to be found, including the skull, tusk, lower jaw and several leg bones. The mammoth site is under 24-hour guard and is on private land.

Read more

Some ancient-DNA evidence has offered new clues to a very cold case: the disappearance of the last woolly mammoths, one of the most iconic of all Ice Age giants, according to a June 7th report published online in Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press.
DNA lifted from the bones, teeth, and tusks of the extinct mammoths revealed a genetic signature of a range expansion after the last interglacial period. After the mammoths migration, the population apparently levelled off, and one of two lineages died out.

In combination with the results on other species, a picture is emerging of extinction not as a sudden event at the end of the last ice age, but as a piecemeal process over tens of thousands of years involving progressive loss of genetic diversity. For the mammoth, this seems much more likely to have been driven by environmental rather than human causes, even if humans might have been responsible for killing off the small, terminal populations that were left - Dr. Ian Barnes, of Royal Holloway, University of London.

Barnes, along with Dr. Adrian Lister of the University College London and the Natural History Museum in London and others, had earlier found evidence that bison, bears, and lions underwent major population shifts twenty-five to fifty thousand years ago. Those results came as a surprise, the researchers said, because scientists tended to think that the major environmental changes happened about fifteen to twenty-five thousand years ago, when the glaciers reached their fullest extent. The findings also offered early human hunters a potential alibi; they didnt come on the scene in large numbers until even later.
In search of a general pattern in the new study, Barnes and Listers team looked to the extinct woolly mammoth. What they found, however, was an interesting pattern, not like those of the other species.

Their genetic data indicate that Siberian mammoths expanded from a small base some time before sixty thousand years ago. Moreover, they found two distinct genetic groups, implying that mammoths had diverged in isolation for some time before merging back into a single population. The DNA further suggests that no later than forty thousand years ago, one of the groups died out, leaving only the second alive at the time of the mammoths last gasp.

At a time when we should be very concerned about the potential extinction of many existing large mammals, studying those that occurred in the geologically recent past can provide many insights. Our work, together with that of others, shows that the conditions for extinction can be set up long before the actual extinction event - Dr. Adrian Lister

Source

Enter the Montshire Museum this winter and step thousands of years into the past to a time when ancestors of modern-day elephants and other remarkable animals stalked the North American landscape. Tusks! Ice Age Mammoths & Mastodons, a new travelling exhibition, comes to the Montshire Museum of Science January 20-March 18.
The exhibition features 80 specimens that include extinct mammoths, mastodons, and some of their Ice Age neighbours, like horses, giant ground sloths, and giant armadillos. Colourful interpretive banners feature artists' reconstructions of the animals and photo murals of palaeontologists at work.

Read more