Tag: mammoths
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The Last Stand of the Woolly Mammoths
Mammoths remained on Wrangel Island, about 80 miles from the Siberian coast, for about 6,000 years after they vanished from the rest of Asia, Europe and North America.Credit…Beth Zaiken Carl Zimmer has an article about the last of the Woolly Mammoths over on the New York Times. A small population of mammoths on Wrangel Island…
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CBC Quirks & Quarks: Black Death origins, chicken domestication, the life of a mastodon…
CBC’s Quirks & Quarks podcast has some interesting stories this week. Origins of the Black Death… it didn’t come from where everyone expected A team of historians, archeologists and geneticists, including Philip Slavin from Stirling University in Scotland, has identified what they believe to be ground zero in the medieval bubonic plague pandemic known as the Black…
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PBS Eons: The Island of the Last Surviving Mammoths
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the last surviving mammoths, who survived until just a few thousand years ago. The Wrangel Island mammoths would end up being the final survivors of a once-widespread genus. In their final years, after having thrived in many parts of the world for millions of…
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Park Ranger Stumbles Upon Treasure Trove of Several-Million-Year-Old Fossils in Northern California
Smithsonian Magazine has a story about the discovery of some Miocene fossils in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. The eight million year old fossils were discovered by Park ranger and naturalist Greg Francek while patrolling the Mokelumne River Watershed. The treasure trove consists of petrified wood, a mastodon skull, a rhino skeleton, a giant…
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NYT: Baby Mammoths Were Meals for These Saber-Tooth Cats
The New York Times Trilobites column has a story about baby mammoths and saber-tooth cats. A recent paper in Current Biology provides evidence of saber-tool cats preying on baby mammoths. The research looked at fossils found in suburban San Antonio, Texas. When most people think of saber-tooth cats, they think of North America’s Smilodon. But…
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PBS Eons: Why Male Mammoths Lost the Game
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about male mammoths and their dangerous and mostly solitary existence. Woolly mammoths, our favorite ice age proboscidean, disappeared from Europe and North America at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. Today, we’ve teamed up with TierZoo to solve one…
