Posted on 02/28/2014 12:56:27 PM PST by fishtank
Wooly Mammoth Mystery Finally Solved?
by Jake Hebert, Ph.D. *
Researchers claim to potentially have solved the mystery of the wooly mammoths mass extinction.1 After drilling permafrost cores in Alaska, Canada, and northern Russia, a team led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen analyzed DNA remnants of Arctic vegetation within those cores. Based upon their analysis of the cores, they concluded that edible plants called forbs (which include sagebrush, yarrow, and mums) were once much more abundant upon the Arctic steppes. Furthermore, the stomach contents within mammoth and other animal carcasses seem to indicate that the mammoths preferred these forbs. The scientists theorize that an invasion by grasses crowded out the forbs, greatly reducing the amount of the mammoths preferred foods. But is this really an adequate explanation? Researchers have long assumed that mammoths did eat grasses, as do modern-day elephants. Yet, even if the mammoths preferred forbs, they could still have presumably subsisted on a grass-rich diet.
This is only the latest of many theories offered to explain the wooly mammoths extinction. As recently as 2013, scientists attributed the animals disappearance to a warming climate.2
Not only is the extinction of the wooly mammoth difficult for secular scientists to explain, but perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the creatures past presence in large numbers in Siberia and other places is also problematic. In secular thinking, we are now living within a warm, relatively short interglacial period that separates longer, colder glacials or ice ages. Yet even in todays supposedly warmer climate, the long winters in Siberia are extremely cold, with temperatures often reaching -40°C or lower!3 How could even the wooly mammoths have tolerated such extremely cold temperatures?
Numbering in the millions, the mammoth herds were too numerous and slow-moving to travel to warmer regions during the winter.4 And even if they could have migrated during winters and returned to Siberia in the summers, the warmer months would also have threatened them, as the sun would have melted the top layers of permafrost and created treacherous bogs for the large beasts to navigate.
It stands to reason that Siberias past climate must have actually been warmer than it is today, with an absence of permafrost. However, this presents an additional problem for secular, uniformitarian theories that assume the exact oppositea colder climate prior to what they would consider our current warmer interglacial.
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Article posted on February 28, 2014.
ICR aricle image...
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http://www.icr.org/article/8010/
I thought they all froze to death from Mammoth pattern baldness
Headline (in Britain):
Wooly Mammoth Died Out By Eating Only Mums!
What mystery?
Noah is well documented as a Mammoth hater.
He simply didn’t put any Mammoths on his ark.
Thus, no Mammoths. Duh.
Obamacare killed them off?
Or, maybe all of their hair fell out so they changed their name to humble elephant!
He wasn’t very fond of unicorns either...
“Noah is well documented as a Mammoth hater.
He simply didnt put any Mammoths on his ark”
They would have made the Ark capsize,,, like Guam!
As soon as they discover a preserved 20,000 BC SUV, the mystery will be solved.
Mammoth, goes well with coffee and crullers.
At least they did manage to get global warming in there.
This is obviously a reference to billy-clubs and / or Tasers.
..With Tasers...
Not sure why this is considered a creation-science issue: wooly mammoths were still around when the pyramids were being built. That’s right: if Abraham wandered far enough into the mountains, he might have seen a few.
And the fact that scientists have problems inferring why they went extinct from such scant evidence 3,000 years later hardly is “problematic” to the principles of paleontology.
A question for anybody—some years ago, maybe 10, a team of scientists found a fully intact, perfectly frozen woolly mammoth in Siberia. Their goal was to thaw it out, clone it or partner it with an elephant, then place the embryo in an elephant’s womb. That was a while ago and I haven’t heard one word about it since then. Does anybody know whatever became of the project? Just curious.
A question for anybody—some years ago, maybe 10, a team of scientists found a fully intact, perfectly frozen woolly mammoth in Siberia. Their goal was to thaw it out, clone it or partner it with an elephant, then place the embryo in an elephant’s womb. That was a while ago and I haven’t heard one word about it since then. Does anybody know whatever became of the project? Just curious.
That’s not true. Noah loved unicorns. He begged them to hurry up, but they were goofing off and didn’t take him seriously.
They certainly could have migrated.
Caribou do so today, over distances that would be comparable, and they also deal with permafrost, taiga and tundra.
Elephants are known to travel such distances also. And they are not a bit slow-moving in fact. I don’t see why mammoths have to be assumed to move slowly.
They could also, like other still existent arctic animals, have dealt with ice ages by simply displacing their range southwards. That sort of thing is well documented in the fossil record. Since it is also well documented that the earth has been through numerous ice age cycles, obviously the mammoths survived several of these.
I think the best explanation for why they disappeared is that people showed up, and the Mammoths proved to be easy prey.
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