Mammoth’s Epic Travels Preserved in Tusk

In an amazing feat of science, chemists have been able to read a kind of travelogue embedded in the tusks of a wooly mammoth that lived 17,000 years ago. Mammoth tusks grew throughout the animal's lifetime, and the tissue picked up isotopes from its environment. Different parts of the world have different isotopes, depending on their geology. By "reading" the isotopes in the tusk, we can know where the mammoth traveled during its life.

Previous analysis of the 1.7-metre-long tusk had showed that it belonged to a male mammoth that died around 17,100 years ago, when it was at least 28 years old. The researchers split the tusk down the middle to reveal the layers of growth, which look like a curving stack of ice cream cones. The base of this stack “is the day that it died and the tip is the day that it was born”, says Wooller. “Everything in between is the lifespan of the mammoth.”

The researchers used lasers to sample the tusk’s chemical composition at approximately 340,000 points along the full length of the cone tips. They then compared the isotopic profiles at each of these data points with a geological map of Alaska and northwest Canada, and used a computer algorithm to map out the most probable routes for the mammoth to have travelled, backtracking from where its remains were found.

“It’s a total soap opera, all the way up to the day it died,” Wooller says.
A close-up view of a split mammoth tusk, stained blue and scored with lines.

This particular mammoth had walked far enough around Alaska and Canada that he could have circled the earth three times! Read more about the research and what we've learned from it at Nature. -via reddit

(Image credit: Mauricio Antón)

#mammoth #isotope

Cross section of the mammoth tusk, stained blue to show growth lines. The chemical compositions of the layers helped researchers track the mammoth's movements.

Credit: J. R. Ancheta, University of Alaska Fairbanks

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