In a new study Wooller led a group of researchers doing just that. Examining the tusk of a woolly mammoth that lived about 17, years ago, they uncovered details about its activities from birth to death. The research, published today in Science , relied on cutting-edge tools and techniques to provide clues about how woolly mammoths lived, including their possible interactions with humans.
Find out how scientists think they could resurrect a woolly mammoth. I met Wooller in the summer of , at the university office where he leads the Alaska Isotopic Research Laboratory. Isotopes are atoms of an element that, because of missing or extra neutrons, have atomic weights slightly different from one another.
In recent years scientists have used isotopes to reconstruct ancient human diets, solve cold case murders, and identify drug smuggling routes. As he later points out in an email, his name bears a striking resemblance to the subject of his latest research. From his office, he leads the way down the hall to his lab. In the center of the room, resting on a black counter, sits the mammoth tusk—five-and-a-half-feet long, thicker than my arm, with a slow corkscrew curve from one end to the other.
Tusks grow in distinct internal layers that look like a stack of ice-cream sugar cones, Wooller explains, but the divisions between layers become irregular on the outside of the tusk.
To capture the entire chemical record of the tusk, the team needed samples from its center. After splitting the tusk, the team took wedge-shaped cuts from its center, each five centimeters long, so they could feed the pieces into a machine that occupies one side of the lab. It then analyzes the resulting atomic mass of the chemicals. The machine can take many isotopic readings per inch, providing a level of detail unavailable by other methods.
Slowly, its laser scrawling a pointillism track across the ivory, it teased out the chemical clues held in the tusk fragments. Also find out how scientists extracted million-year-old DNA from mammoth teeth. Strontium isotopes make up the heart of the study. Animals acquire strontium through the plants they eat, which absorb it from the underlying rock.
Different geological regions have different strontium isotopic signatures. As the mammoth ate its way across the landscape, the strontium being sequestered in its tusks became a record of its travels. Wooller, M. Article Google Scholar. Download references. Research Highlight 10 NOV News 05 NOV Research Highlight 27 OCT Article 10 NOV Article 27 OCT University of Washington UW.
Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily. Advanced search. Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature. Pingback: Science Saturdays: Mammoth Facts captain overpants. Pingback: [Friday] — Pingback: Texel fossil woolly rhinoceros discovery Dear Kitty. Some blog. Pingback: Charles Saulson,. Pingback: Daryl Bujak. Pingback: Glenn aronow. Contrary to common belief, the woolly mammoth was hardly mammoth in size.
They were roughly about the size of modern African elephants. Its cousin the Steppe mammoth M. Like their thick coat of fur, their shortened ears were an important cold-weather adaptation because it minimized frostbite and heatloss. The first set, called the milk tusks, are very small and are present when mammoths are 6 months to one year old. The second set of tusks is permanent. Tusks have a thin enamel covering but they are mostly made of two materials: cementum and dentine.
Cementum is a bonelike substance that supports a tooth.
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