* Astronomy

On a sunny, brisk late November day, Edward Breck Parkman hunched over and rubbed his back, pachyderm-like, against a large rock jutting out of a meadow on the rugged, green coastline near Bodega Bay.
The senior archaeologist for the California Department of Parks and Recreation does not usually play-act in the field, but on this day he wanted to re-create in real life the scene from the late Pleistocene Epoch that he has brought to life in the minds of scientists and researchers around the globe.

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A pig-sized, tusked creature that roamed the earth some 27 million years ago represents a missing link between the oldest known relatives of elephants and the more recent group from which modern elephants descended, an international team that includes University of Michigan paleontologist William J. Sanders has found.
The group's findings, to be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that mastodons and the ancestors of elephants originated in Africa, in contrast to mammals such as rhinos, giraffes and antelopes, which had their origins in Europe and Asia and migrated into Africa. The dating of the new fossil, discovered in the East African country of Eritrea, also pushes the origins of elephants and mastodons five million years farther into the past than previous records.

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A new study suggests the extinction of mastodons and mammoths in North America may have come from a tuberculosis pandemic that originated in China among an ancient mammoth-like creature.

Mastodons were ancient elephants that resembled mammoths, but were shorter and had less hair. Mammoths and mastodons roamed the North American continent before mysteriously disappearing about 10,000 years ago during the last major Ice Age.
Scientists examining mastodon skeletons found a type of bone damage in several of the animal's foot bones that is found only in sufferers of tuberculosis. Bones attacked by tuberculosis suffer a type of damage in which bone beneath cartilage is scooped out, or "excavated."
Tuberculosis is a bacterial infection that commonly infects the lungs, but can also affect other parts of the body, such as organs and bones.
Only about 1 to 7 percent of infected humans develop bone damage. The fact that more than half of the mastodon skeletons examined had the bone lesions suggests tuberculosis was a "hyperdisease" that afflicted a large percentage of the North American mastodon population.
The disease would have weakened both animals, making them easier for humans to hunt and kill. They also would have been more vulnerable to changes in the climate.

Source Xinhua

The coat colour of woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) that roamed the Earth thousands of years ago has been determined by scientists.

Some of the curly tusked animals would have sported dark brown coats, while others had pale ginger or blond hair.
The information was extracted from a 43,000-year-old woolly mammoth bone from Siberia using the latest genetic techniques.
Writing in the journal Science, the researchers said a gene called Mc1r was controlling the beasts' coat colours.
This gene is responsible for hair-colour in some modern mammals, too.
In humans, reduced activity of the Mc1r gene causes red hair, while in dogs, mice and horses it results in yellow hair.

Using ancient DNA extracted from the excavated mammoth bone, the international team of researchers were able to look at the variations in copies of the Mc1r gene.
Dr Michael Hofreiter, an author on the paper and an evolutionary biologist from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany, said analysis revealed two different versions of the gene were present - a fully active and a partially active version.
The researchers propose that hair coloration in mammoths is likely to have been determined in the same way as in present-day mammals.
This means that mammoths with one copy of the active gene and one of the partially active gene would have had dark coats - most likely dark brown or black.

Source BBC