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The carcass was remarkably well preserved, but something was clearly wrong. A rounded hole through the interior jugal. Deep incisions along the ribs. Dents in the left scapula. A broken mandible. This 45,000 year-old mammoth's life ended violently at the hands of hunters. That wouldn't be surprising-it's well known that Pleistocene humans were expert mammoth killers=but for the location. It was excavated from a permafrost embankment at Yenisei bay, a remote spot in central Siberia where a massive river empties into the Arctic Ocean. That makes this brutalized mammoth the oldest evidence for human expansion into the high Arctic by...

BODIES of extinct Ice Age mammals, such as woolly mammoths, that have been frozen in permafrost for thousands of years may contain viable sperm that could be used to bring them back from the dead, scientists said yesterday. Research has indicated that mammalian sperm can survive being frozen for much longer than was previously thought, suggesting that it could potentially be recovered from species that have died out...

Gene reveals mammoth coat colour By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC News Woolly mammoths had both dark and light coats The coat colour of mammoths that roamed the Earth thousands of years ago has been determined by scientists. Some of the curly tusked animals would have sported dark brown coats, while others had pale ginger or blond hair. The information was extracted from a 43,000-year-old woolly mammoth bone from Siberia using the latest genetic techniques. Writing in the journal Science, the researchers said a gene called Mc1r was controlling the beasts' coat colours. This gene is responsible for hair-colour in...

(snip) Most scholars now agree that hunters—more than climate change or a mystery epidemic—are what doomed the mammoths. Whatever the cause, by 11,000 years ago the king of the Pleistocene was a goner. (snip) If a group of devotees has its way, this shaggy ice-age mascot—and a host of other bygone megafauna besides—may yet walk again. (snip) The scientists, in other words, had managed to assemble half the woolly-mammoth genome; they claimed that in three years they could finish the job. That would put scientists within striking distance of an even greater feat: repopulating the earth with creatures that vanished...

Sorry if this is a repost. Elephants and lions unleashed on North America? 18:00 17 August 2005 NewScientist.com news service Kurt Kleiner Elephants, lions, cheetahs and camels could one day roam the western US under a proposal to recreate North American landscapes as they existed more than 13,000 years ago, when humans first encountered them. The plan, proposed in a commentary in Nature and co-authored by 13 ecologists and conservation biologists, would help enrich a North American ecosystem that was left almost devoid of large mammals at the end of the Pleistocene period. It would also help preserve wildlife that...

(Filed: 20/12/2005) The first serious possibility that the woolly mammoth, or something like it, could walk on Earth again was raised yesterday by an international team of scientists. Woolly mammoths died out approximately 10,000 years ago A portion of the genetic code of the mammoth has been reconstructed and, to the surprise of scientists, the team that carried out the feat believes that it will be possible to decode the entire genetic make-up. The tusked beast stood 12-feet tall, weighed up to seven tons and had a shaggy dark brown coat that hung from its belly. DNA was extracted from...

Elephants, lions, cheetahs and camels could one day roam the western US under a proposal to recreate North American landscapes as they existed more than 13,000 years ago, when humans first encountered them. The plan, proposed in a commentary in Nature and co-authored by 13 ecologists and conservation biologists, would help enrich a North American ecosystem that was left almost devoid of large mammals at the end of the Pleistocene period. It would also help preserve wildlife that faces the threat of extinction in Africa and Asia. Between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, 97 of 150 genera of large mammals...

A bacterium that sat dormant in a frozen pond in Alaska for 32,000 years has been revived by NASA scientists. Once scientists thawed the ice, the previously undiscovered bacteria started swimming around on the microscope slide. The researchers say it is the first new species of microbe found alive in ancient ice. Now named Carnobacterium pleistocenium, it is thought to have lived in the Pleistocene epoch, a time when woolly mammoths still roamed the Earth. NASA astrobiologist Richard Hoover, who led the team, said the find bolsters the case for finding life elsewhere in the universe, particularly given this week's...

Uncovering Ice Age archaeology in JordanEarly humans hunted large game near now-vanished lakes By Daily Star Staff Tuesday, August 24, 2004 AMMAN: The early prehistory and archaeology of the Middle Pleistocene, or Ice Age, is being revealed in remarkable detail in studies in southern Jordan. The work, begun in the late 1990s, has documented the presence of Homo erectus, our ancient ancestor, at a series of archaeological sites at Ayoun Qedim in the al-Jafr Basin. Today al-Jafr Basin is one of the most arid places in the Middle East. During the Pleistocene, the basin was filled with an enormous freshwater...

"Jurassic Park" was a work of fiction. Pleistocene Park is in the process of becoming fact. A joint team of Japanese and Russian scientists arrived in the Siberian province of Yakutsk late last month to excavate a number of creatures that have been extinct for millennia -- including mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses. They plan to extract DNA from the frozen remains, cross-breed the retrieved nuclei with the creatures' modern-day counterparts and return the resurrected dinosaurs to a vast "safari park" in northern Siberia. "It probably sounds a little far-fetched, but it's absolutely possible to do this," said professor Akira Iritani,...

HOT SPRINGS -- Joanne Bugel is happy to be the Earthwatch volunteer who uncovered the 115th tusk at the Mammoth Site and moved the popular Hot Springs tourist site’s mammoth tally to 58. [snip] This group has been a particularly productive bunch, said crew chief Don Morris. [snip] Bones unearthed by 2008 Earthwatch volunteers include: three tusks, a tooth, a patella, six ribs, a fibula, four vertebra and assorted other bones. Neteal Graves, 18, of Kaycee, Wyo., also unearthed some coprolite – [snip] Graves has the Mammoth Site in her bloodline. In 1974, her mother, Cheri Graves, was a college...

Woolly mammoths could one day walk the Earth again, it seems. In an extraordinary Jurassic Park- style experiment, DNA from a frozen specimen of the extinct giant was used to reproduce their blood. And it revealed that the beasts used more than their distinctive shaggy coats to keep warm in harsh Arctic conditions 25,000 years ago - they had antifreeze in their veins. The scientists believe the genetic adaptation technique could be used to resurrect body parts and proteins from other extinct animals. Researcher Prof Kevin Campbell-of the University of Manitoba, Canada, said: 'The molecules are no different than going...

Frozen baby mammoth to be sent to Japan for research (Kyodo) _ A frozen mammoth found recently in Russia in unprecedented good condition is set to be sent to a Japanese university for examination, several experts told Kyodo News on Friday. The mammoth, thought to be a six-month-old female, was found in the best state of preservation among all frozen mammoths ever recovered, said the experts. "The mammoth has no defects except that its tail was bit off," said Alexei Tikhonov, vice director of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. "In terms of its state of preservation,...

Public release date: 16-Jun-2004 Contact: Marie Gilbert marie.gilbert@uaf.edu 907-474-7412 University of Alaska Fairbanks Mammoths stranded on Bering Sea island delayed extinction Fossil is first record in the Americas of a mammoth population to have survived the Pleistocene Woolly mammoths stranded on Pribilofs delayed extinction Fossil is first record in the Americas of a mammoth population to have survived the Pleistocene St. Paul, one of the five islands in the Bering Sea Pribilofs, was home to mammoths that survived the extinctions that wiped out mainland and other Bering Sea island mammoth populations. In an article in the June 17, 2004 edition...

Scepitical? Look at the clip and you tell me Red furry coat, giant tusks... elephants of any sort not native to the region, either! The Siberian Woolly Mammoth -which we are taught disappeared abruptly at the end of the last Ice Age (~8000 B.C.)- has long been a source of fascination, as on occasion examples are found in a highly-preserved, mummified state under the Arctic territory's thick layer of permafrost.  Similar in appearance to a modern elephant, the Mammoth was actually only slightly larger (~3m at the shoulder) yet with a shorter trunk, longer tusks, ears only 10% the size of their contemporary brethren,...

A BEAST lurches through icy waters in a sighting a paranormal investigator thinks could prove woolly mammoths are not extinct after all. The animal – thought to have mostly died out roughly 4,000 years ago – was apparently filmed wading through a river in the freezing wilds of Siberia. The jaw-dropping footage was caught by a government-employed engineer last summer in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug region of Siberia, it is claimed. He filmed the elephant-sized creature as it struggled against the racing water. Its hair matches samples recovered from mammoth remains regularly dug up from the permafrost in frozen Russia....

Woolly mammoths' last stand before extinction in Siberia wasn't made by natives - rather, the beasts had American roots, researchers have discovered. Woolly mammoths once roamed the Earth for more than a half-million years, ranging from Europe to Asia to North America. These Ice Age giants vanished from mainland Siberia by 9,000 years ago, although mammoths survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until roughly 3,700 years ago. "Scientists have always thought that because mammoths roamed such a huge territory - from Western Europe to Central North America - that North American woolly mammoths were a sideshow of no...

> "Mammoths are conventionally believed to have become extinct in North Western Europe about 21,000 years ago during the main ice advance, known as the 'Last Glacial Maximum'" said Lister. "Our new radiocarbon dating of the Condover mammoths changes that, by showing that mammoths returned to Britain and survived until around 14,000 years ago." >