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SCIENTISTS HAVE SOLVED the mystery of why the overwhelming majority of mammoth fossils are male, according to a report published this week in the journal Current Biology.
Much like wild elephants today, young male Ice Age mammoths likely roamed alone and more often got themselves into risky situations where they were swept into rivers, fell through ice or into bogs or sinkholes that preserved their bones for thousands of years, scientists say.
Females, on the other hand, traveled in a group led by an older matriarch who knew the terrain and steered her counterparts away from danger.
“Without the benefit of living in a herd led by an experienced female, male mammoths may have had a higher risk of dying in natural traps such as bogs, crevices, and lakes,” said co-author Love Dalen of the Swedish Museum of Natural History.
The study used genomic data to determine the sex of 98 woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) fossils in Siberia.
Researchers found that 69 percent of the samples were male, an unusually skewed sex ratio, assuming that the sexes were fairly even at birth.
“We were very surprised because there was no reason to expect a sex bias in the fossil record,” said first author Patricia Pecnerova, also at the Swedish Museum of Natural History.
Therefore, researchers believe that something about the way they lived influenced the way they died.
“Most bones, tusks, and teeth from mammoths and other Ice Age animals haven’t survived,” explained Dalen.
“It is highly likely that the remains that are found in Siberia these days have been preserved because they have been buried, and thus protected from weathering.”
These giant, tusked herbivores disappeared about 4,000 years ago, as the climate warmed and the beasts were increasingly hunted by humans.
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Nice to think that when our ancestors were building Newgrange & Knowth, these woolly giants were still roaming free.
@Honeybadger197: not in Ireland they weren’t. So while the lads were building newgrange the last of the mammoths were struggling in north America…..
@Nial D: I know they weren’t here. It was nice just to illustrate how recently they were alive. The last of the mammoths lived off Eastern Siberia – Wrangel Island….
@Honeybadger197: Mammoth bones were found in Castlepook cave in Cork.Look it up.
@Padraig: That was a delivery mix up by An Post. :) Thanks for that. They found Hyena bones there too. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25522968?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
The precursors of today’s young male motor cyclists with a similar survival rate
@Zx5vZulB: along with cyclists and car drivers
This generations boy racers.
We need to introduce gender quotas for mammoths immediately.
@Eric De Red: gender quotas for fossils in general. This is an outrage.
Lone male danger to himself and others .
The headline ‘Scientists have solved…’ is a little misleading as they usually propose a theory which seems to fit the known evidence or most of it very well.
Mammoth tusk ahead proving all this shaggy story,no doubt we will try to ice age the truth…
Next Journal.ie poll: Should there be gender quotas for woolly mammoth fossils?
these things were huge. be grand if scientists brought them back mind you they’d take some feeding. Still, be nice to see them in the flesh
Just a technical question… have mammoths been extinct long enough to be “fossilized ” ?
Nice
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