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To: peyton randolph
wooly mamoths were not "ice age" animals. they were tropical animals like all elephants. The most famous of all mammoths, the frozen Berezovka mammoth, is displayed in the Zoological Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in the struggling position in which he was found near Siberia’s Berezovka River, just inside the Arctic Circle. His trunk and much of his head, reconstructed in this display, had been eaten by predators before scientists arrived in 1901. In 1977, the first of two complete baby mammoths was found—a 6–12-month-old male named “Dima.” Several rhinoceroses have also been found. Other fleshy remains come from a horse,a young musk ox, a wolverine, voles, squirrels, a bison, a rabbit, and a lynx. Nikolai Vereshchagin, Chairman of the Russian Academy of Science’s Committee for the Study of Mammoths, estimated that more than half a million tons of mammoth tusks were buried along a 600-mile stretch of the Arctic coast. The mammoth’s hairy coat no more implies an Arctic adaptation than a woolly coat does for a sheep. The mammoth lacked erector muscles that fluff up an animal’s fur and create insulating air pockets. Neuville, who conducted the most detailed study of mammoth skin and hair, wrote: “It appears to me impossible to find, in the anatomical examination of the skin and [hair], any argument in favor of adaptation to the cold.” Long hair on a mammoth’s legs hung to its toes. Had it walked in snow, snow and ice would have caked on its hairy “ankles.” Each step into and out of snow would have pulled or worn away the “ankle” hair. All hoofed animals living in the Arctic, including the musk ox, have fur, not hair, on their legs. Fur, especially oily fur, holds a thick layer of stagnant air (an excellent insulator) between the snow and skin. With the mammoth’s greaseless hair, much more snow would touch the skin, melt, and increase the heat transfer 10–100 fold. Later refreezing would seriously harm the animal. Skin. Mammoth and elephant skin are similar in thickness and structure. Both lack oil glands, making them vulnerable to cold, damp climates. Arctic mammals have both oil glands and erector muscles—equipment absent in mammoths. Fat. Some animals living in temperate zones, such as the rhinoceros, have thick layers of fat, while many Arctic animals, such as reindeer and caribou, have little fat. Thick layers of fat under the skin simply show that food was plentiful. Abundant food implies a temperate climate. Elephants. The elephant—a close approximation to the mammoth lives in tropical or temperate regions, not the Arctic. It requires “a climate that ranges from warm to very hot,” and “it gets a stomach ache if the temperature drops close to freezing. Newborn elephants are susceptible to pneumonia and must be kept warm and dry. Hannibal, who crossed the Alps with 37 elephants, lost all but one due to cold weather. Water. If mammoths lived in an Arctic climate, their drinking water in the winter must have come from eating snow or ice. A wild elephant requires 30–60 gallons of water each day. The heat needed to melt snow or ice and warm it to body temperature would consume about half a typical elephant’s calories. Unlike other Arctic animals, the trunk would bear much of this thermal (melting) stress. Nursing elephants require about 25% more water. Salt. How would a mammoth living in an Arctic climate satisfy its large salt appetite? Elephants dig for salt using their sharp tusks. In rock-hard permafrost this would be almost impossible, summer or winter, especially with curved tusks. Nearby Plants and Animals. The easiest and most accurate way to determine an extinct animal’s or plant’s environment is to identify familiar animals and plants buried nearby. For the mammoth, this includes rhinoceroses, tigers, horses, antelope, bison, and temperate species of grasses. All live in warm climates. Some burrowing animals are frozen, such as voles, who would not burrow in rock-hard permafrost. Even larvae of the warble fly have been found in a frozen mammoth’s intestine—larvae identical to those found in tropical elephants today. No one argues that animals and plants buried near the mammoths were adapted to the Arctic. Why do so for mammoths? Temperature. The average January temperature in northeastern Siberia is about -28°F, 60°F below freezing! During the Ice Age, it was much colder. The long, slender trunk of the mammoth was particularly vulnerable to cold weather. A six-foot-long nose could not survive even one cold night, let alone an eight-month-long Siberian winter or a sudden cold snap. For the more slender trunk of a young mammoth, the heat loss would be deadly. An elephant usually dies if its trunk is seriously injured. No Winter Sunlight. Cold temperatures are one problem, but six months of little sunlight during Arctic winters is quite another. While some claim that mammoths were adapted to the cold environment of Siberia and Alaska, vegetation, adapted or not, does not grow during the months-long Arctic night. In those regions today, vegetation is covered by snow and ice ten months each year. Mammoths had to eat—voraciously. Elephants in the wild spend about 16 hours a day foraging for food in relatively lush environments, summer and winter. Three Problems. Before examining other facts, we can see three curious problems. First, northern Siberia today is cold, dry, and desolate. Vegetation does not grow during dark Arctic winters. How could millions of mammoths and other animals, such as rhinoceroses, horses, bison, and antelope, feed themselves? But if their environment was more temperate and moist, why did it change? Second, the well-preserved mammoths and rhinoceroses must have been completely frozen soon after death or their soft internal parts would have quickly decomposed. Guthrie has written that an unopened animal continues to decompose long after a fresh kill, even in very cold temperatures, because its internal heat can sustain microbial and enzyme activity as long as the carcass is completely covered with an insulating pelt. Because mammoths had such large reservoirs of body heat, the freezing temperatures must have been extremely low. Finally, their bodies were buried and protected from predators, including birds and insects. Such burials could not have occurred if the ground were perpetually frozen as it is today. Again, this implies a major climate change, but now we can see that it must have changed dramatically and suddenly. How were these huge animals quickly frozen and buried—almost exclusively in muck, a dark soil containing decomposed animal and vegetable matter? Muck. Muck is a major geological mystery. It covers one-seventh of the earth’s land surface—all surrounding the Arctic Ocean. Muck occupies treeless, generally flat terrain, with no surrounding mountains from which the muck could have eroded. Russian geologists have in some places drilled through 4,000 feet of muck without hitting solid rock. Where did so much eroded material come from? What eroded it? Oil prospectors, drilling through Alaskan muck, have “brought up an 18-inch-long chunk of tree trunk from almost 1,000 feet below the surface. It wasn’t petrified—just frozen.” The nearest forests are hundreds of miles away. Williams describes similar discoveries in Alaska: Though the ground is frozen for 1,900 feet down from the surface at Prudhoe Bay, everywhere the oil companies drilled around this area they discovered an ancient tropical forest. It was in frozen state, not in petrified state. It is between 1,100 and 1,700 feet down. There are palm trees, pine trees, and tropical foliage in great profusion. In fact, they found them lapped all over each other, just as though they had fallen in that position. How were trees buried under a thousand feet of hard, frozen ground? We are faced with the same series of questions we first saw with the frozen mammoths. Again, it seems there was a sudden and dramatic freezing accompanied by rapid burial in muck, now frozen. Clearly. mammoths did not live in the cold artic, but rather, a tropical one. For many more facts, see Frozen Mammoths
50 posted on 08/15/2006 12:20:57 AM PDT by Nathan Zachary
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To: Nathan Zachary

Then again, maybe - NOT.


55 posted on 08/15/2006 1:10:46 AM PDT by Al Simmons ('A Personal Relationship w/God' is a mind control technique that blocks critical thinking receptors)
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To: Nathan Zachary

nice try creation boy, but you cant explain the tiny ears. the tiny ears were to prevent heat loss.


62 posted on 08/15/2006 3:26:23 AM PDT by Vaquero ("An armed society is a polite society" Robert A. Heinlein)
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To: Nathan Zachary

Many years ago I read an article about gold miners in Alaska who were using steam jets to cut into the frozen muskeg and sliuce gold. At a certain depth the hita very deep layer of frozen tropical plants including palm trees that were torn apart and quick frozen by some natural disaster. Also uncovered very massive amounts of animal remains, also shredded and instantly frozen. This include remains of giant sloths and saber toothed tigers.

The author alluded to a slippage of the Earth's crust on its core by about 90 degrees. I have at times come across this theory again with predictions that it has occurred several times in Earth's history. Therefore polar regions instantly became equatorial regions and vice versa. It was postulated that the shredding occurred due to the speed with which the crust shift occurred while the atmosphere did not shift resulting massive wind velocities and by huge displacement of oceans and seas. If the displacement happend so fast it stands to reason that the weather systems would not have shifted thus the "new" polar areas would have resulted in the rapid freezing of the once tropical areas. Likewise the shift would have resulted in the quick thawing of glaciers and ice caps that may have shifted with the crust resulting in rapid thawing of massive amounts of ice and snow that resulted in very large raises of sea level.

One must keep in mind that the one's position on the face of the sphere could spell survival or death. Example: if the centerline of the shift occurred on the Greenwich meridian from North to South those living 90 degrees E & W longitude may have noticed very little except a 90 degree rotation of the heavens. The closer you lived to the prime shift radial the more violent the results would be.

Not saying it happend; but some scientists believe that there is evidence to support this theory. There is a school of thought that says this happend within the last fifteen to twenty thousand years when massive amounts of ice wre stored in the polar regions and that the Earth's crust become top-heavy and shifted south. That would account for the end of the last ice age. It would also mean that Antartica was once a tropical clime.


71 posted on 08/15/2006 5:27:27 AM PDT by .44 Special (Death to Traitors!)
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To: Nathan Zachary
I suppose we're supposed to ignore the fact that your source gives not a single fragment of evidence for the claim that the environment occupied by Pleistocene mammoths was "tropical".

And of course there are volumes of evidence (plants preserved in the mammoths' stomachs, pollen inventories of core samples, isotope ratios, etc) that the environment was arctic and subarctic or alpine, if somewhat different from the same regions today:

However, the Siberian steppes during the last ice age were not covered in ice and snow as they are now, nor was the ground frozen. The reason is that so much of the available water was locked up in the arctic ice pack -- primarily in North America -- that the subarctic steppes were much drier than today. As a result, the Siberian soil thawed to a greater depth and supported a richer variety of plant life. This included nutritious grasses. The stomach contents of preserved mammoths indicate that they fed on such grasses, as well as mosses, sedges, herbaceous pollens and spores, and fragments of willow and bilberry. Some rare poppies and buttercups have also been found in addition to small amounts of arboreal material such as larch needles, willows, and tree bark. Such variety indicates the mammoths lived in a variety of climates in Siberia. These ranged from dry and steppe-like to slightly wet to swampy to arctic/alpine.

Mammoth trunk tips were bi-lobed, useful for collecting herbaceous food. Relatively little arboreal material has been found in mammoth stomachs. Modern elephants, in contrast, prefer an arboreal diet, and their trunk tips are of unequal size.

The greater abundance and variety of steppe vegetation during the ice ages explains how the steppes could support large grazing animals like mammoths. The mammoths may also have migrated south in the winter and north in the summer. Modern elephants are great travellers, so possibly mammoths were too.

How old are the frozen mammoth remains from Siberia? They fall into two main groups, one dating from about 45,000 BP to 30,000 BP and the other from 14,000 to 11,000 BP. This does not mean that mammoths were not present in Siberia from 30,000 BP to 14,000 BP. Instead, this indicates the climatic conditions were not right for the formation of frozen carcasses. There are plenty of fossil bones of mammoths from 30,000 to 14,000 BP. This was a period of massive glacial advance, resulting in extremely dry conditions in Siberia. In these dry conditions, mammoth carcasses would tend to rot on the surface and/or be eaten by predators. In times of glacial retreat, when the climate was moister, summer mudflows and floods could rapidly cover carcasses. These covered carcasses would then become permanently frozen as the permafrost layer closed in above them during the following winter.

Was the climate warmer or colder in Siberia at the time the mammoths lived there? Well, both. It appears that at some periods the climate was warmer, at others it was colder. This is inferred by comparing the modern ranges of the plants found in mammoth stomachs as well as by astronomical calculations of temperature similar to those presented at various times in the past in this news group. The mammoths thrived in either case. The determinative factor was the decreased moisture so that the ground did not become permanently frozen as it is today. As a result, the "mammoth steppe" biome, comprised of grasses, succulent herbs, and wormwood, thrived. This biome disappeared around 9000 BP except for some small patches. It was replaced by the current boggy tundra vegetation and permafrost. The mammoths, having lost their source of food, disappeared in Siberia at about the same time. It is possible that predation by man was also partly responsible. The earliest human remains in Siberia date from the end of the last ice age.

source


101 posted on 08/15/2006 11:02:39 AM PDT by Stultis
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