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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....

Interview with Ross MacPhee What killed the mammoths and other behemoths that once roamed the Americas? This mammalogist thinks it may have been hyperlethal disease Image: Clare Flemming Around 11,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, North America witnessed an extinction that claimed its mammoths, giant ground sloths, camels and numerous other large-bodied animals. Exactly what happened to these megafauna is unknown. Indeed, researchers have puzzled over their disappearance for decades. Traditional explanations hold that either dramatic climate shifts, or human hunting (overkill) extinguished these species. But in recent years a new hypothesis has emerged. According...

Although human hunting played a part in the demise of the woolly mammoth about 10,000 years ago, homo sapiens were but bit players in a global drama involving climate change, comet impact and a multitude of other factors, scientists have found in separate studies. Previous research had blamed their demise on tribal hunting. But new findings “pretty much dispel the idea of any one factor, any one event, as dooming the mammoths,” said Glen MacDonald, a researcher and geographer at the University of California in Los Angeles, to LiveScience.com. In other words, hunting didn’t help, but it was not instrumental....

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,...

Well-preserved frozen woolly mammoth fragments have been discovered deep in Siberia that may contain living cells, edging a tad closer to the possibility of cloning a prehistoric animal, the mission's organiser has said. Russia's North-Eastern Federal University said an international team of researchers had discovered mammoth hair, soft tissues and bone marrow some 328 feet (100 meters) underground during a summer expedition in the northeastern province of Yakutia. Expedition chief Semyon Grigoryev said Korean scientists with the team had set a goal of finding living cells in the hope of cloning a mammoth. Scientists have previously found bones and fragments...

One of the things that came up in the many comments appended to the article on Bob's painting of extinct Maltese animals was the famous Egyptian tomb painting of the 'pygmy mammoth'. You're likely already familiar with this (now well known) case: here's the image, as it appears on the beautifully decorated tomb wall of Rekhmire, 'Governor of the Town' of Thebes, and vizier of Egypt during the reigns of Tuthmose III and Amenhotep II (c. 1479 to 1401 BCE) during the XVIII dynasty... In 1994, Baruch Rosen published a brief article in Nature in which he drew attention to...

Scientists Aim to Revive the Woolly Mammoth Scientists with the Mammoth Creation Project hope to find a frozen woolly mammoth specimen with sperm DNA. The sperm DNA would then be injected into a female elephant; by repeating the procedure with offspring, a creature 88 percent mammoth could be produced within fifty years. "This is possible with modern technology we already have," said Akira Iritani, who is chairman of the genetic engineering department at Kinki University in Japan and a member of the Mammoth Creation Project. However, the DNA in mammoth remains found to date has been unusable, damaged by time...

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...

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....