Cool, it is a baby mammoth: A new traveling museum exhibit features a frozen baby mammoth, found in the ice of Siberia in 2007.
Courtesy Field MuseumA few years ago, I posted a story about the find of a frozen baby mammoth in Siberia. You can refresh your memory of that discovery here.
Now, an exhibit on mammoths and mastodons has opened at the Field Museum of Chicago and visitors have the chance to see the frozen mammoth baby up close and in person (and right now you can look at the photo of it on exhibit right next to this paragraph). The Field Museum hosts the exhibit through Sept. 5 and then an international tour begins, running through 2014.
Here's an interesting story about what researchers have been able to learn about mammoths based on their findings from the mammoth baby, as well.
Tags : The straight poop: Mammoth style
in History and Nature of Science, Scientific Inquiry, and Biological Populations Change Over Time
Poop with flies: you always manage to find a few of these guys on the pile.
Courtesy PKmousiePoop. Poop. Poop. Poop. There. Have I got your attention? Of course, who can resist a story on poop? It is such a widely discussed topic with a vast array of monikers. Probably not a decent topic of conversation for invited guests or the dinner table, but it does get its chat time. Despite the disgust that it truly is, there is a curious fascination with the whole matter. It can tell you about your health, especially if you have the runs. It can tell you if you’ve been chewing your food well, or if you need to lay off the cheese. If you are a proper biologist, you’ve probably bent down and touched it or even broke it up to examine what passed. Certain scientists, such as Scatologists pursue the study of scat (poop) as a means to tell us more about a certain animal’s habits. If by the Fates, a poo survives intact and becomes old enough to fossilize, then we would call it a coprolite. Coprolites have been recovered from dinosaurs, ancient whales, fish, and prehistoric mammals to name a few.
Coprolite: one very old poo
Courtesy AlishaV
Recent news from BBC detailed a story about scientists studying the ancient droppings from mammoths. Well sort of. The researchers were examining mud deposits from a lake for fungal spores that are produced in large herbivore dung (mammoth poo). Their research concludes that the extra large mammals of the recent past experienced a slow and steady decline starting about 15,000 years ago. This flies in the face of the current prevailing theory, that an asteroid impact about 12,900 years ago caused global upheaval, world spread wildfire, and then abrupt extinction of the mega mammals. The asteroid theory had already been under assault by lack of evidence in soil samples. Samples taken all over the continent in soil cores extracted from peat bogs and lake bottoms.
Mammoth: artistic re-creation
Courtesy ecstaticist Was early man really responsible for the start of the downfall of the mammoth? I think undoubtedly we had a hand in their fate, but the answer is most likely multifaceted. Taking a closer look at the dung heaps of the past may well continue to give us a better picture of paleohistory. Just watch where you step!
Nice story on a recent find of a baby mammoth"
General Mammoth info
http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/larson/mammuthus.html
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/mammal/mammoth/about_mammoths.html
Man vs. mammoth: Is a face-off like this in our future...again?
Courtesy redskunkScientists are another step closer to making Jurassic Park a reality. Well, not quite Jurassic Park, but certainly Pleistocene Park.
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University have decoded 80 percent of the DNA for the woolly mammoth, an elephant ancestor that went extinct about 10,000 years ago. The results of their study appear in the journal Nature.
The DNA was extracted from actual mammoth hair found preserved in the permafrost of Siberia. Hair encapsulates DNA, providing a purer source of the genetic material than that found in fossil bones that are vulnerable to contamination by bacteria and other creatures involved in decomposition. We covered this in a previous post.
About six million years of evolution separate the wooly mammoth from its modern descendents the Indian and African elephants. And so far they appear genetically to be very similar, although a complete assessment of differences won’t be available until the complete genomes of mammoths and modern elephants are mapped. The data sets for each is comprised of about 4 billion DNA bases.
But even then you don’t have to worry about rogue mammoths running amok on the interstates (have you ever hit a moose? Multiply that experience by about 15). Science is still decades away from cloning an actual specimen – or even a hybrid with a living elephant - from the genetic material. The technology just isn’t there yet. But that’s not the only thing in the way.
"It could be done,” said co-author Stephan Schuster, a biochemistry professor at Penn State. “The question is, just because we might be able to do it one day, should we do it?"
Sounds familiar doesn’t it? The same question was posed by one of the characters in Michael Crichton's book Jurassic Park just before things got really hairy.
SOURCES and LINKS
Penn State's mammoth research page
Live Science story
Previous Buzz story on mammoth cloning
Mammoths on display: Early engraving from the St. Petersburg museum
Courtesy Mark RyanPaleontologists have uncovered the skull of a rare mammoth species in southern France that could help fill in a gap of knowledge about mammoth evolution.
The skull belongs to a steppe mammoth (Mammuthus trogontherii), a large creature that roamed the Ice Age landscape during the Middle Pleistocene some 400,000 years ago. While alive, the steppe mammoth stood about 12 feet tall at the shoulder and spent its life grazing on grasses. Few skulls of this intermediate beast have been found so this latest discovery could help link the evolutionary path between the earlier southern mammoth (Mammuthus meridionalis) and the later woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius).
"This specimen is of extreme importance because we don't know that much about the Middle Pleistocene," said Dick Mol, an amateur paleontologist from the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, who discovered the skull with French paleontologist Frederic Lacombat. Photos of the dig can be viewed here.
Mammoth skull: American Museum of Natural History
Courtesy Mark RyanThe earlier southern mammoth lived life browsing on trees and shrubs in a savannah-type environment, much like that found today in Senegal, Africa. But the steppe mammoth, and its descendent the woolly mammoth, lived in a colder, harsher environment. Their molars show an adaptation to the tougher steppe grasses that took over the savannah as the climate got colder and the latest ice age began.
SOURCE and LINKS
BBC site story
Origin and evolution of mammaths
More mammoth facts
Mammoth museum in Russia video
Mammoth site in South Dakota
Wooly mammoth ivory boom
in Historic Perspectives and Biological Populations Change Over Time
40 tons of Russian mammoth ivory exported last year
Wooly mammoth tusks
Courtesy Hyperbolation Wooly mammoth tusks are thawing out of the permafrost in Russia. Reindeer herders, oil and gas workers and professional ivory hunters are gathering up nearly pristine ivory as it emerges from the thawing permafrost. The tusks emerge with the spring thaw or after heavy rains, or along the eroding banks of rivers.
“They gather tusks like mushrooms after the rain, literally,” said Aleksei Tikhonov, the director of the Zoological Museum in St. Petersburg and an expert on mammoths.
Will mammoth ivory help endangered elephants?
About 90 percent of the Siberian ivory that is recovered is exported to Asia, where it is principally used in the manufacture of personal seals that in Japan, China and South Korea are used in place of signatures for business transactions.
150,000,000 mammoths still buried
The Siberian permafrost blankets millions of square miles. Hidden in one of the upper layers of this mass, corresponding to the Pleistocene Epoch, are the remains of an estimated 150 million mammoths. If left outside and exposed to the elements, this ivory will disintegrate within three years into worthless splinters. While prices vary, leading dealers in Moscow usually ask $150 to $200 a pound for average-grade ivory.
Source: New York Times
Mammoth skeleton on display at the American Museum of Natural History. Photo courtesy Mark Ryan.
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