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ST. DAVID — There’s no telling how many times Milton Curtis stepped over those odd-looking rocks as he went about the day-to-day business of ranching. Back in 1921, life on Curtis Ranch in St. David was filled with cattle and horses and providing for a young family. Things like dinosaurs really weren’t the topic of discussion, nor did they get much attention. But in 1921, that changed. “What my father thought were rocks were actually the tips of tusks from a giant mastodon dinosaur,” chuckled 98-year-old Clea Brown, her eyes sparkling as she talked about a discovery that launched the...

Just hope that the current interglacial period will last for a few more decades to come. Anything else would spell disaster for much of mankind! Lyuba, of course, is the name bestowed upon the baby mammoth that was found a few years ago in the western Siberian tundra. The baby woolly mammoth is thought to be around 40,000 years old (by now) and is thought to have died by drowning at the age of two months. What’s so remarkable is Lyuba’s state of preservation, almost life-like, with skin and (sparse) hair fully intact. That kind of find is most uncommon.

Paleontologists are in the final stages of extracting the skeleton of a huge mammoth discovered buried two metres underneath a busy street in the Mexican city Tultepec. New images of the excavation site have revealed the sheer size of the prehistoric animal, which experts believe died between 12,000 and 14,000 years ago in what is now the city's suburb of San Antonio Xahuento. With a metre-wide skull and tusks spanning more than ten feet, the skeleton belongs to Mammuthus Columbi, a North American mammoth which expects believe grew sixteen feet high and weighed up to 10 tonnes.

"Patagonia turns out to be the Rosetta Stone - it shows that human colonisation didn't immediately result in extinctions, but only as long as it stayed cold," says study leader Professor Alan Cooper, ACAD Director. "Instead, more than 1000 years of human occupation passed before a rapid warming event occurred, and then the megafauna were extinct within a hundred years." The researchers, including from the University of Colorado Boulder, University of New South Wales and University of Magallanes in Patagonia, studied ancient DNA extracted from radiocarbon-dated bones and teeth found in caves across Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego, to trace...

The geology of the site, as well as pollen and algae finds, suggest that the hunter-gatherers encountered the mastodon next to a small pond that both humans and animals used as a water source, the researchers believe. Waters said that the prehistoric "people knew how to find game, fresh water and materials for making tools. These people were well adapted to this environment. The site is a slam-dunk pre-Clovis site with unequivocal artifacts, clear stratigraphy and thorough dating." Another research team previously excavated the site and found what they believed were dog remains, so dogs "would most likely have been...

Scientists from the University of Oxford and the University of Manchester have used a new technique, "Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry," or ZooMS, to identify more than 2,000 bone fragments recovered from Russia's Denisova Cave. ZooMS analyzes the collagen peptide sequences in bone, which can then be used to identify its species. Among the remains of mammoths, woolly rhino, wolf, and reindeer, the researchers found one Neanderthal bone. "When the ZooMS results showed that there was a human fingerprint among the bones I was extremely excited. ...The bone itself is not exceptional in any way and would otherwise be missed by...

The carcass of one of a pair of extinct big cat cubs will be scrutinised this autumn with the realistic possibility that a liquid found in the remains of the animal is milk from the mother. Separately, it was recently revealed that samples of the prehistoric infant are being examined by South Korean to clone an animal that once occupied Eurasia from modern day Great Britain to the extreme east of Russia. A source close to the case told The Siberian Times that there is 'hope' the frozen remains of a cave lion cub will show evidence of its mother's...

Woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos and other large animals driven to extinction since the last ice age each succumbed to a different lethal mix of circumstances... Researchers who studied the fate of six species of 'megafauna' over the past 50,000 years found that climate change and habitat loss were involved in many of the extinctions, with humans playing a part in some cases but not others. But there was no clear pattern to explain why the animals died off, and it proved impossible to predict from habitat or genetic diversity which species would go extinct and which would survive. "It almost...

Do earthquakes explain all those mastodon bones at Snowmass? Not likely, say scientists, although they haven’t completely shelved the idea. And did humans kill a mammoth 50,000 years ago and then cache the meat for later use? Circumstantial evidence of rocks intermixed with bones suggests that was the case. If so, it would rank as one of the major scientific discoveries of the decade, putting people on the North American continent some 36,000 years earlier than what is now generally agreed upon by archaeologists. That intriguing idea also remains on the shelf, just beyond touch for lack of corroborating evidence.

The 10,000 year old bones of a mammoth and other extinct mammals have been unearthed in the north end zone of Oregon State University's Reser Stadium. Construction crews digging up earth during the expansion of the Valley Football Center expansion project...

Battle scars on male mastodon tusks show these Ice Age giants were not the peaceful creatures once thought... The scars reveal they fought in brutal combat each year during seasonal phases of heightened sexual activity and aggression. The discovery, announced at a recent Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Ontario, counters the view that now-extinct mastodons were peaceful, passive creatures that rarely engaged in battles. It also strengthens the link between mastodon and modern elephant behaviour, since male bull elephants also fight seasonal, hormonally-charged battles to show their dominance and win desired mates... "Mastodon tusks curve upward strongly at the...

Elephants, Human Ancestors Evolved in Synch, DNA Reveals Hope Hamashige for National Geographic News July 23, 2007 The tooth of a mastodon buried beneath Alaska's permafrost for many thousands of years is yielding surprising clues about the history of elephants—and humans. A team of researchers recently extracted DNA from the tooth to put together the first complete mastodon mitochondrial genome. The study, published in the journal PLoS Biology, significantly alters the evolutionary timeline for elephants and their relatives. The research may put to rest a contentious debate by showing that woolly mammoths are more closely related to Asian elephants than...

Mastodons Driven to Extinction by Tuberculosis, Fossils Suggest Kimberly Johnson for National Geographic News October 3, 2006 Tuberculosis was rampant in North American mastodons during the late Ice Age and may have led to their extinction, researchers say. Mastodons lived in North America starting about 2 million years ago and thrived until 11,000 years ago—around the time humans arrived on the continent—when the last of the 7-ton (6.35-metric-ton) elephantlike creatures died off. Scientists Bruce Rothschild and Richard Laub pieced together clues to the animals' widespread die-off by studying unearthed mastodon foot bones. Rothschild first noticed a telltale tuberculosis lesion on...

<p>Calle the ailing elephant died at the San Francisco Zoo on Sunday morning, hours after another elephant attacked her -- an attack that zoo officials are blaming on animal rights demonstrators who they say agitated the beasts.</p> <p>Zoo veterinarians quietly euthanized Calle, a 37-year-old female Asian elephant, at about 5 a.m., after she dropped to her belly and rolled on her side.</p>

SAN PASQUAL VALLEY – For 50 years she called San Diego County home. That's why animal-welfare activists are upset that Peaches, the oldest African elephant in the country, died earlier this week at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo. Activists are criticizing the San Diego Wild Animal Park for its decision to move Peaches and two other older elephants, Wankie and Tatima, to the cold-weather city in early 2003. With two of those elephants now dead, they called the move "grossly irresponsible." Peaches, 55, died of "complications due to old age," according to Lincoln Park officials. She was found lying on the...

PARIS - Cecile de Brunhoff, the inspiration for Babar, the enchanting little elephant whose adventures captivated generations of children, has died in Paris. She was 99. De Brunhoff suffered a stroke Saturday night and died Monday in a hospital in Paris, where she lived, said Mathieu de Brunhoff, one of her sons. She first invented the tale of a little elephant as a bedtime story for her boys in 1931. They in turn told their father, painter Jean de Brunhoff, who illustrated the story and filled in details, naming the elephant Babar and creating Celeste, Zephir and the "Old Lady,"...

The good news is that even though TB is highly contagious, the three infected elephants at the zoo did not spread the disease to visitors, including those who attended one of Rama's painting parties in which he created splatter paintings. About 5 percent of the captive Asian elephants in North America are infected. The disease can be deadly to elephants. Three pachyderms at an exotic animal farm in Illinois died from the disease between 1994 and 1996, according to the CDC. One handler in that outbreak got sick as well. At the Oregon Zoo, the first case popped up in...

This Ancient, Deadly Disease Is Still Killing In Europe John Donnelly, GlobalPost Dec. 30, 2011, 12:53 PM GENEVA, Switzerland – On the sidelines of a conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, just three months ago, a senior health official from Belarus met privately with Mario Raviglione, whose job here at the World Health Organization’s headquarters is to control the spread of tuberculosis around the world. Belarus needed help. It had just confirmed a study that found 35 percent of all TB cases in the capital of Minsk were multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) – the highest rate in the world ever recorded for...

Research Casts New Light on History of North America Research by a Valparaiso University geography professor and his students lends support to evidence the first humans to settle the Americas came from Europe, rather than crossing a Bering Strait land-ice bridge. Valparaiso’s research shows the Kankakee Sand Islands – a series of hundreds of small dunes in the Kankakee River area of Northwest Indiana and northeastern Illinois – were created 14,500 to 15,000 years ago and that the region could not have been covered by ice as previously thought. Newswise — Research by a Valparaiso University geography professor and his...

Land-ice Bridge, New Research Suggests -- Research by a Valparaiso University geography professor and his students on the creation of Kankakee Sand Islands of Northwest Indiana is lending support to evidence that the first humans to settle the Americas came from Europe, a discovery that overturns decades of classroom lessons that nomadic tribes from Asia crossed a Bering Strait land-ice bridge. Valparaiso is a member of the Council on Undergraduate Research. Dr. Ron Janke began studying the origins of the Kankakee Sand Islands – a series of hundreds of small, moon-shaped dunes that stretch from the southern tips of Lake...