Woolly Mammoth: Secrets from the Ice Page #3
- Year:
- 2012
- 84 Views
At London's Natural History Museum,
Professor Adrian Lister
through his collection of bones,
tusks, and, in particular, teeth.
What we've got here is a lower jaw,
or mandible, of a very early mammoth.
So here's the jawbone,
and this is a kind of molar tooth
that is adapted for eating plant
matter, as all elephants and mammoths do,
and, by counting the number
of enamel ridges in this tooth -
this one's got about ten -
we get an idea of what kind
of plant food these animals ate.
This one would suggest that this creature
was eating the leaves of trees and shrubs,
quite soft vegetation.
Teeth like this show that mammoths
shared a common ancestor with living
elephants about six million years ago.
Over the next three million years,
mammoths separated into different species
as they moved north
from their Southern African origins.
It was the early mammoths
that grew truly huge,
some standing over four metres tall
at the shoulder,
as an African bull elephant.
From about three million years ago,
we pick up the first remains of the
mammoth line out of Africa, north of Africa.
As they moved through
the Middle East and into Eurasia,
mammoths evolved very quickly.
Adapting to the cooling conditions,
their tails and ears shrank
to conserve heat.
Woolly mammoths eventually ended up
the same size as Asian elephants.
Just like elephants, they probably
spent most of their day eating,
but the plants of the steppe
were far tougher than
those available in the tropics.
Mammoths had four molar teeth.
To cope with the wear and tear
caused by their new diet,
than seen in their relatives.
And so we have fossils
like this molar, from Siberia,
and that is just about as far
as it got, that's the limit.
So you can see that there's
about 26 of these enamel ridges.
They're very closely packed.
This is an almost 100% grass eater,
which is a late Pleistocene woolly
mammoth. This is from the last ice age.
As members of the elephant family,
it's believed that mammoths would have behaved
in a very similar way to their modern relatives.
They would have lived
females of all ages,
young males and infants.
Now,
remains from the Siberian permafrost
are revealing far more than
just teeth and bones ever could.
The frozen baby Lyuba shows that
mammoths possessed an unusual tool,
perfect for feeding on the steppe.
She's got this very particular shape
to the end of her trunk,
which is quite different
from modern-day elephants,
and it's designed
to be able to delicately pull up
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