FROM THE NOVEMBER 2016 ISSUE
Uncovering the Secrets of Mammoth Island
The Ice Age giants of St. Paul Island outlived those on the mainland for millennia. What finally drove them to extinction?
By Jessica Marshall|Wednesday, October 12, 2016
RELATED TAGS: ANIMALS, PALEONTOLOGY, CLIMATE CHANGE, ECOLOGY
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An iconic example of the Ice Age megafauna of North America, the mammoth went extinct soon after humans arrived on the continent — except for isolated populations.
Stephen Wilkes, Courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives, Victoria, BC, Canada
One day thousands of years ago, on a tiny island in the middle of the Bering Sea, a woolly mammoth made a fatal misstep. It fell into a pit-like cave with no escape, and there it died.
In 2003, another animal entered the cave — with a ladder. As he explored the space with his colleagues, Russell Graham, a paleontologist from Pennsylvania State University, lifted a rock near the back. There he found a single, pristine tooth from the mammoth, oblong and bumpy and as big as a loaf of bread. “It looked like you had just taken it out of the animal’s mouth,” says Graham, a tall, broad-shouldered man. With a beard and a slightly shuffling gait, he seems a bit of mammoth himself.
http://discovermagazine.com/2016/nov/mammoth-island
