
Woolly Mammoth: Secrets from the Ice
- Year:
- 2012
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Imagine an elephant, but with tusks
living today.
Imagine an elephant, but covered
in a thick shaggy coat of hair,
some of those hairs
over a metre in length.
Imagine an elephant which lived
not in the warmth of the tropics,
but in the ice
and snow of the north.
The woolly mammoth.
These majestic titans ruled Europe
and Asia
long before our own ancestors
Extinct for thousands of years,
they are iconic, yet mysterious.
Climate change means that the frozen
north is melting faster than ever before.
Prehistoric carcasses are emerging
and, from them,
we can unlock the secrets
of these long-lost beasts.
Using the latest technology,
we can now answer questions about the
mammoth which have long-puzzled scientists.
This is, in essence,
virtual time travel.
That's starting to sound
a little bit like Jurassic Park!
We're able to trace their evolution,
revealing their adaptations
to one of the harshest places
on the planet.
This is amazing!
And with every new find,
we take a step closer
to answering the biggest question
of all -
why did these magnificent animals
suddenly go extinct?
I want to show you. Oh, fantastic. That's
brilliant. I want to share with you.
Siberia.
Here, the temperature hovers
around minus 40 for months on end.
it was a different story.
THUNDER RUMBLES:
This giant swathe of Eurasia was
home to vast herds of woolly mammoths.
Perfectly adapted
to the extremes of the Arctic,
a tiny population survived
on a remote island
But, on mainland Siberia,
they mysteriously died
out at the end of the last Ice Age.
But we're left with a treasure trove
of their remains,
locked in Siberia's layer
of frozen ground...
.. the permafrost.
As global warming
raises the earth's temperature,
melting the permafrost
faster than ever,
the secrets of the mammoth
are finally emerging.
After centuries of collecting
their remains,
we can paint a detailed picture
of these long-lost beasts
far better than we can
for any other extinct species.
We know that they lived
for up to 60 years
and were perfectly built
for life in the freezer.
But many of their adaptations
have remained secret, until now.
And there's one big question,
which remains unanswered.
What killed them off?
This is one of the most famous
mammoth-finds of recent years.
She's called Lyuba,
and she's a little baby mammoth,
probably just a month old.
She was found in 2007
and she is amazingly well preserved,
so that we have her skin,
her soft tissues
and we even have
the contents of her gut.
Lyuba has been radio carbon dated
to 37,000 years old.
Found in the far northwest
of Siberia,
she's considered to be the
best-preserved mammoth ever discovered.
It's wonderful to get so close
to this little baby mammoth
and see how beautifully preserved she
is. You can see the texture of the skin.
You can see individual
hair follicles there,
and there's even some fur preserved,
And then on the surface of the skin as
well, there are these peculiar blue discs,
which are part of a fungal infestation
part of the burial environment
that she was in.
And she's lost her tail,
that's about the only bit of her
that isn't there.
It's thought that Lyuba
died in a bog,
where she was first pickled by natural
chemicals, and then quickly frozen.
Large specimens,
like fully-grown mammoths,
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"Woolly Mammoth: Secrets from the Ice" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2021. Web. 9 Mar. 2021. <https://www.scripts.com/script/woolly_mammoth:_secrets_from_the_ice_23657>.