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Woolly mammoths died out because of dwindling grasslands - rather than being hunted to extinction by humans, according to a Durham University study.After the coldest phase of the last ice age 21,000 years ago, the research revealed, there was a dramatic decline in pasture on which the mammoths fed. The woolly mammoth was once commonplace across many parts of Europe. It retreated to northern Siberia about 14,000 years ago, where it finally died out approximately 4,000 years ago.

James Bristle of Lima Township was digging in a soybean field Monday when he and his friend pulled up what they first thought was a bent, muddy old fence post. But it was actually the rib bone of an ancient woolly mammoth... University of Michigan professor Daniel Fisher... believes that the mammoth died between 11,000 and 15,000 years ago. Most mammoths were gone by 10,000 years ago... “We get calls once or twice a year about new specimens like this,” Fisher told The Washington Post. But they’re usually mastodons. It’s a bit more unusual to find a mammoth, the group...

GRAPEVINE — These bones won’t talk — at least not until they’re unearthed again.Still smarting over the theft of dinosaur footprints this spring, the Army Corps of Engineers and the city of Grapevine have reburied parts of a Columbian mammoth that were found along the receding shore line.Visitors came across a jawbone and part of a tusk, and there may be more bones in the area, but there are no plans to study the location that is somewhere on 1,200 acres of Corps property under lease to the city, said Dale King, a conservation specialist with the corps. The find...

Russia has opened a laboratory in Siberia devoted to the study of extinct animal DNA in the hope of creating clones, it's reported. The new lab in Yakutsk - often called the world's coldest city - will "seek out live cells with a view to cloning", says Semen Grigoryev, director of the Mammoth Museum at the city's Northeastern Federal University. He tells Ogonek magazine that "the priority is to look into bringing back the mammoth", adding that the Beijing Institute of Genomics and South Korea's Sooam Biotech company, which has pioneered dog cloning, will be involved in the study.

Acting as super-predators, humans are forcing changes to body size and reproductive abilities in some species 300 percent faster than would occur naturally, a new study finds. Hunting and fishing by individual sportsmen as well as large-scale commercial fishing are also outpacing other human influences, such as pollution, in effects on the animal kingdom.

This image shows mammoth vertebrae in ice, Yukon Territory, Canada. Credit: Photo Kieren Mitchell, University of Adelaide ******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************* New research has revealed abrupt warming, that closely resembles the rapid man-made warming occurring today, has repeatedly played a key role in mass extinction events of large animals, the megafauna, in Earth's past. Using advances in analysing ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating and other geologic records an international team led by researchers from the University of Adelaide and the University of New South Wales (Australia) have revealed that short, rapid warming events, known as interstadials, recorded during the last ice age or Pleistocene...

Animals go extinct, places too. And stories change. Boaz, a small village in Richland County, Wis., has only 156 people these days. There are a half-dozen streets, a couple of taverns, a small park with a baseball diamond and, on the outskirts, a historic marker describing the village's lone claim to fame: "the Boaz Mastodon." The story on the marker is the one that's been told to schoolchildren for almost a century as they stare up at the mastodon skeleton, enshrined in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Geology Museum. It is a story that, until now, has endured largely unchanged: One...

Scientists are one step closer to bringing a woolly mammoth back to life. A new analysis of the woolly mammoth genome has revealed several adaptations that allowed the furry beasts to thrive in the subzero temperatures of the last ice age, including a metabolism that allowed them to pack on insulating fat, smaller ears that lost less heat and a reduced sensitivity to cold. The findings could enable researchers to "resurrect" the ice-age icon — or at least a hybridized Asian elephant with a few of the physical traits of its woolly-haired cousin, said study co-author Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary...

It will definitely be possible within the foreseeable future to bring back the long-extinct woolly mammoth, a top geneticist has said. However, in his regretful opinion such a resurrection should not be carried out. The assertion comes in the wake of a new study of mammoth genetics as compared to their cousins the Asian and African elephants, which live in warm habitats very different from the icy northern realms of the woolly giant. The new study offers boffins many revelations as to the differences which let the elephants and mammoths survive in such different conditions. “This is by far the...

The first comprehensive analysis of the woolly mammoth genome reveals extensive genetic changes that allowed mammoths to adapt to life in the arctic. Credit: Giant Screen Films © 2012 D3D Ice Age, LLC ======================================================================== The first comprehensive analysis of the woolly mammoth genome reveals extensive genetic changes that allowed mammoths to adapt to life in the arctic. Mammoth genes that differed from their counterparts in elephants played roles in skin and hair development, fat metabolism, insulin signaling and numerous other traits. Genes linked to physical traits such as skull shape, small ears and short tails were also identified. As a...

Alaska's first full mammoth skeleton may be lurking under Arctic lake. When an aquatic ecologist was surveying shallow lakes in Northwest Alaska three years ago, she and the pilot who traveled with her came upon an unusual sight in the treeless Arctic region: a pair of terns that kept flying around and perching on what appeared to be a log sticking out of a muddy area. The protruding object, it turns out, was no log. It was the large and well-preserved leg bone of a woolly mammoth. Right by it was another bone, perfectly articulated, that was clearly from the...

Paleontologists are calling a recent find in the Russian region of Yakutia a “sensation.” Last September, Aleksandr Banderov and his hunting party were traveling near the Semyulyakh River when they uncovered the preserved carcass of an adolescent wholly rhinoceros, a species that roamed the frozen landscapes of Europe and northern Asia during the last Ice Age. The hunters initially thought it was a reindeer frozen in the ice, but quickly realized it was something much older. “We were sailing past a ravine and noticed hair hanging on the top of it,’ Alexander told The Siberian Times. “At first we thought...

A group of Russian and South Korean researchers has begun their attempt to clone a woolly mammoth, starting by extracting DNA from a spectacularly well-preserved specimen discovered in the Siberian permafrot in 2013. The project is led by Hwang Woo-Suk, a Korean cloning scientist who was the focus of a scandal in 2006 involving fraudulent research on human stem cells. Hwang has had success with animals, however, reportedly creating the world's first cloned dog and several cloned coyotes.

Recent scientific findings date their arrival earlier than ever thought, sparking hot debate among archaeologists For much of its length, the slow-moving Aucilla River in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first Americans.For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse.Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Florida Museum of...

They're probably about half as old as scientists once thought they were. But a pair of butchered bones found in a cave near the Alaska-Yukon border are "definite" evidence of human presence in North America just after the end of the last Ice Age, perhaps as much as 14,000 years ago, according to a new study. The bones were originally discovered in the late 1970s by Canadian archaeologist Dr. Jacques Cinq-Mars at a site known as Bluefish Caves, high in northwestern Yukon Territory. In one of the caves, dubbed Cave 2, archaeologists found more than 18,000 fragments of bones from...

Indian DNA links to 6 'founding mothers' By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer NEW YORK - Nearly all of today's Native Americans in North, Central and South America can trace part of their ancestry to six women whose descendants immigrated around 20,000 years ago, a DNA study suggests. Those women left a particular DNA legacy that persists to today in about 95 percent of Native Americans, researchers said. The finding does not mean that only these six women gave rise to the migrants who crossed into North America from Asia in the initial populating of the continent, said study co-author...

A re-dating of mastodon bones reveals that the extinct mammals, related to the modern day elephant, disappeared from the area during a glacial period more than 50,000 years earlier than previously thought. Existing age estimates of American mastodon fossils indicate that these extinct relatives of elephants lived in the Arctic and Subarctic when the area was covered by ice caps—a chronology that is at odds with what scientists know about the massive animals' preferred habitat: forests and wetlands abundant with leafy food... Over the course of the late Pleistocene, between about 10,000 and 125,000 years ago, the American mastodon (Mammut...

An archaeologist says it remains a mystery how a circle of stones initially arrived at the floor of Michigan's Grand Traverse Bay. Underwater archeologist Mark Holley said while he first discovered the underwater stones in 2007, no one has been able to prove whether the rocks were placed there by nature or by mankind, the Chicago Tribune reported Sunday. "The first thing I said when I came out of the water was, 'Oh no, I wish we wouldn't have found this,'" Holley said of his discovery. "This is going to invite so much controversy that this is where we're going...

Biologists briefly brought the extinct Pyrenean ibex back to life in 2003 by creating a clone from a frozen tissue sample harvested before the goat's entire population vanished in 2000. The clone survived just seven minutes after birth, but it gave scientists hope that "de-extinction," once a pipedream, could become a reality. Ten years later, a group of researchers and conservationists gathered in Washington, D.C., today (March 15) for a forum called TEDxDeExtinction, hosted by the National Geographic Society, to talk about how to revive extinct animals, from the Tasmanian tiger and the saber-toothed tiger to the woolly mammoth and...

An 11-year-old Russian boy stumbled across the 30,000-year-old remains of a woolly mammoth, an experience that was surely either incredibly exciting or permanently traumatising. According to the Moscow News, Yevgeny Salinder found the 500-kilogram beast in the tundra of the Taymyr peninsula in northern Russia. Scientists laboured for a week with axes and steam to dig it out of the permafrost it's been encased in for centuries. Woolly mammoths have been found in the permafrost in Siberia since at least 1929, but this is one of the best preserved. Its tusks, mouth and rib cage are clearly visible....