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A quiet afternoon on a farm turned into a moment of prehistoric discovery. What this teen uncovered could rewrite part of ancient history. What began as a simple search for arrowheads on an Iowa farm turned into an extraordinary encounter with the past. A teenager’s unexpected discovery of a 34,000-year-old mastodon jaw is now capturing the attention of scientists and shedding new light on Ice Age life in North America. Chance Find Reveals Ancient Ice Age Resident The student was simply enjoying a day outdoors when he came across a large bone fragment partially embedded in the ground. Curious, he...

A woolly mouse, a breed created by scientists using genetic engineering. The development is a first step toward reviving a version of the extinct woolly mammoth. Colossal Biosciences Scientists have genetically engineered mice with some key characteristics of an extinct animal that was far larger — the woolly mammoth. This "woolly mouse" marks an important step toward achieving the researchers' ultimate goal — bringing a woolly mammoth-like creature back from extinction, they say. "For us, it's an incredibly big deal," says Beth Shapiro, chief science officer at Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas company trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth and other...

A New York homeowner unearthed a mastodon jaw that was peeking from beneath the soil in the backyard of their home. This is the first time a find like this has occurred in 11 years. The researchers who were alerted to the Orange County resident’s discovery spent two and a half days digging in the individual’s backyard. They uncovered more mastodon bone pieces and a complete adult jaw. Mastodons are closely related to elephants and the extinct wooly mammoth. Researchers and historians tend to say that these animals roamed all over the world, but their fossils have only been found...

Researchers found direct evidence that Clovis people relied heavily on mammoths for food, using isotopic analysis to confirm 40% of a Clovis mother's diet came from mammoths. The study highlights how hunting large animals supported the Clovis people's mobility and rapid spread, while also contributing to the extinction of Ice Age megafauna...The study, featured on the Dec. 4 cover of the journal Science Advances, employed stable isotope analysis to reconstruct the diet of the mother of an infant found at a 13,000-year-old Clovis burial site in Montana. Previously, researchers inferred prehistoric diets primarily through indirect evidence, such as stone tools...

Ancient Greek authors believed that Mende was used as a base camp for giants before battle, and as palaeontologist Evangelia Tsoukala has been finding out, it's clear to see why.Unearthing The Bones of Greece's Ancient 'Giants' | 2:18BBC Timestamp | 784K subscribers | 9,562 views | September 19, 2024

Archeologists unearthed an ancient mastodon skull from an Iowa creek this month — marking the first ever discovered in the state.It took 12 days for excavators to slowly recover the massive fossil, which was so well preserved that it still had a significant section of its once-curved tusk...Radiocarbon dating shows that the mastodon died in the Paleoindian period — and had been buried undetected for 13,600 years.Mastodons — a 6-ton distant cousin to modern-day elephants — went extinct in North America around 10,500 years ago...Though other remains of the mastodon were recovered, the skull was the most well-preserved piece of...

Prehistoric humans hunt a woolly mammoth. More and more research shows that this species – and at least 46 other species of megaherbivores – were driven to extinction by humans. Credit: Engraving by Ernest Grise, photographed by William Henry Jackson. Courtesy Getty’s Open Content Program ================================================================== Researchers at Aarhus University have concluded that human hunting, rather than climate change, was the primary factor in the extinction of large mammals over the past 50,000 years. This finding is based on a review of over 300 scientific articles. Over the last 50,000 years, many large species, or megafauna, weighing at least 45...

The woolly mammoth could roam the Earth once again. That’s the goal of Colossal Biosciences as the biotech company announced a major breakthrough Wednesday in its mission to revive the 6-ton, 16-foot animal back from extinction. The Dallas-based company said it has created a set of stem cells from an Asian elephant in hopes of bringing back a creature that would be eerily similar to the woolly mammoth, according to reports. “This is probably the most significant step in the early stages of this project,” said geneticist and company co-founder George Church, a Harvard University professor, according to NPR. The...

An adult mastodon tooth that was spotted at Rio Del Mar Beach near Aptos Creek is now in the hands of paleontologists in Santa Cruz. The foot-long tooth was found by Jennifer Schuh while walking the beach on Friday. Not knowing what it was, she snapped a few photos, posted them on social media and left it on the sand. That caught the attention of paleontologist Wayne Thompson at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. "He called me and told me what it was and I rushed back, but it was gone. I was crushed," Schuh said. "I knew...

Based on sites excavated in the western United States, archaeologists know Paleo-American Clovis hunter-gatherers who lived around the time of the extinctions at least occasionally [emphasis added] killed or scavenged Ice Age megafauna such as mammoths. There they've found preserved bones of megafauna together with the stone tools used for killing and butchering these animals...Unfortunately, many areas in the Southeastern United States lack sites with preserved bone and associated stone tools that might indicate whether megafauna were hunted there by Clovis or other Paleo-American cultures. Without evidence of preserved bones of megafauna, archaeologists have to find other ways to examine...

Paleontologists are busy this Memorial Day weekend trying to find a tooth in Santa Cruz County that dates back to the Ice Ages. An unknown beach-goer picked up a giant mastodon tooth that first surfaced on an Aptos beach Friday. Now scientists are hoping that the scientifically significant tooth will be returned to the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History where it can be studied and displayed for the public as a piece of ancient history. US Census breakdown: The largest racial group in each Bay Area county The 1-foot-long tooth was originally spotted by a beach-goer strolling through the...

Kap København Formation Two Million Years Ago Reconstruction of Kap København formation two million years ago in a time when the temperature was SIGNIFICANTLY WARMER than northernmost Greenland today. Credit: Beth Zaikenjpg ******************************************************************************** A ‘game-changing’ new chapter in the history of evolution has been opened after two-million-year-old DNA has been identified for the first time. Researchers discovered microscopic fragments of environmental DNA in Ice Age sediment in northern Greenland. Using cutting-edge technology, they found that the fragments are one million years older than the previous record for DNA, which was sampled from a Siberian mammoth bone. “For the first time...

Scientists discovered the oldest known DNA and used it to reveal what life was like 2 million years ago in the northern tip of Greenland...With animal fossils hard to come by, the researchers extracted environmental DNA, also known as eDNA, from soil samples..."I wouldn't have, in a million years, expected to find mastodons in northern Greenland," said Love Dalen, a researcher in evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University...

Researchers from the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) have identified the remains of a mammoth in the town of Los Reyes de Juárez, Mexico.The mammoth was uncovered in one of the towns municipal cemeteries whilst workers were preparing new graves.Upon further inspection, biologist Iván Alarcón Durán identified that they were the bones of megafauna from the Pleistocene, with initial studies suggesting the remains are an elderly male Columbian mammoth.The Columbian mammoth (mammuthus columbi) inhabited North America as far north as the northern United States and as far south as Costa Rica during the Pleistocene epoch. DNA studies shows...

Researchers with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) found and extracted a mammoth tusk deep under the ocean. According to MBARI, their team spotted the tusk 185 miles offshore and 10,000 feet deep on top of a seamount in 2019. They returned on July 2021 to bring the tusk to the surface. "The researchers have confirmed that the tusk—about one meter (just over three feet) in length—is from a Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi)," reported the institute. They believe it could be the oldest well-preserved mammoth tusk recovered from this area of North America. The Columbian mammoth went extinct around 11,500...

Previous studies had indicated that while most mammoths likely died out around 10,000 years ago, a few had managed to survive in small populations on remote islands off the coast of Siberia. There had even been suggestions that some of these isolated island populations had held on until around 4,000 years ago. Now though, the results of a ten-year study involving the collection and analysis of 535 samples of sediment and permafrost from Siberia, Canada, Alaska and Scandinavia have yielded evidence to suggest that mammoths had still been roaming the wilds of mainland Siberia as recently as 3,900 years ago....

Researchers discovered four charred seeds of a wild tobacco plant within the hearth contents, along with stone tools and duck bones left over from meals. Until now, the earliest documented use of tobacco came in the form of nicotine residue found inside a smoking pipe from Alabama dating to 3,300 years ago. The researchers believe the nomadic hunter-gatherers at the Utah site may have smoked the tobacco or perhaps sucked wads of tobacco plant fiber for the stimulant qualities offered by the nicotine it contained. After tobacco use originated among the New World's native peoples, it spread worldwide following the...

It started with a petrified tree, half-buried in the mud of the Mokelumne River watershed in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The site intrigued Greg Francek, a ranger for East Bay Municipal Utility District, as he was walking the valley last summer. He inspected further, and what he recently discovered led to one of the most significant fossil discoveries in California history. Advertisement "I looked around the area further and I found a second tree," Francek said in an EBMUD statement released this week, documenting the discovery. "And then a third and so on. After finding dozens of trees I realized...

That’s a rare find in Florida! A giant bone of a Mammoth dating back to the Ice Age was just found in the Peace River near Arcadia this week. The 4-foot, 50-pound bone is well over 10,000 years old! For two Florida scuba divers, ancient history resurfaced when they discovered a 4-foot, 50-pound mammoth bone dating back to the ice age. Derek Demeter and Henry Sadler, both avid explorers and amateur paleontologists, made their big discovery when diving in the dark waters of the Peace River near Arcadia on April 25. “[Henry] came up, and he’s like, ‘Derek, I found...

Scientists have identified the largest ever assemblage of mammoth bones. team of scientists has discovered the largest collection to date of mammoth skeletons in one place, just outside Mexico City. The researchers have counted more than 200 individual mammoths to date—and believe there are still more to discover. In 2018, the government announced the development of a new Mexico City airport at the Santa Lucía Air Force Base, north of the city. People have found mammoth remains in the northern part of the city and the wider region since the 1970s. So, Pedro Francisco Sánchez Nava, the national coordinator of...