Replies

A regular african elephant can easily eat 3-4 hundred pounds of grass and bark a day. A mammoth can be expected to eat even more.

I saw a picture of an excavation site for on of the mammoths once. All you see is ice. Then, near the horizon, you see alot of frozen water. That's it. No trees, no waving fields of grass, no low lying scrub plants, nothing.

And there were TENS OF THOUSANDS of the critters up there. Along with giant rhinos and a bunch of other very large mammals.

The gold miners in Alaska and northern Canada found stuff. Vast areas of smashed and crushed bones. Few of the bones were articulated (like your bones would be connected if you fell down and died and decomposed and weren't eaten.)

The majority of the stuff (they call muck) is like it went through a blender crushed and smashed bones, trees, river rock, all mixed together, and flash frozen.

Whatever happened, it WAS NOT a nice gentle warming where the ice caps melted and gradually receded. It was much more cataclysmic.

Clone the beast!
I wanna eat mammoth meat on Mondays!

The gold miners in Alaska and northern Canada found stuff. Vast areas of smashed and crushed bones. Few of the bones were articulated (like your bones would be connected if you fell down and died and decomposed and weren't eaten.) The majority of the stuff (they call muck) is like it went through a blender crushed and smashed bones, trees, river rock, all mixed together, and flash frozen.

Glaciers do that as they move. (Except for the "flash frozen" part, which is an exaggeration.)

Whatever happened, it WAS NOT a nice gentle warming where the ice caps melted and gradually receded. It was much more cataclysmic.

"Cataclysmic" can be a relative term. Those fields of "muck" could have been gathered over many, many years as a glacier crawled over the landscape.

The majority of the stuff (they call muck) is like it went through a blender crushed and smashed bones, trees, river rock, all mixed together, and flash frozen.

Whatever happened, it WAS NOT a nice gentle warming where the ice caps melted and gradually receded. It was much more cataclysmic.

That certainly seems to be a reasonable conclusion. Perhaps a "pole shift" or an asteroid collision which quickly altered the Earth's axis of rotation could be the mechanism.

Clone the beast! I wanna eat mammoth meat on Mondays!

A wildlife organization I belong to just had a big regional "wild game cook-off" event yesterday. I had some quail soup, elk roast, bear stew and cajun-fried alligator, but at the end of the day I had that "something's lacking" feeling. Now I realize what it was - no mammoth!

Thanks for the follow-up!

A regular african elephant can easily eat 3-4 hundred pounds of grass and bark a day. A mammoth can be expected to eat even more.

Actually, mammoths were about the size of the modern Asian elephant (to which they were closely related*). The consumption figures for Asian elephants can be used pretty much as-is for mammoths.

*Asian elephants are more closely related to mammoths than to African elephants. There's a whole lot of good information on the critters at Wikipedia.