Mammoth - AJ

·       Contrary to common belief, the woolly mammoth was hardly mammoth in size. They were roughly about the size of modern African elephants. A male woolly mammoth’s shoulder height was 9 to 11 feet tall and weighed around 6 tons. Its cousin the Steppe mammoth (M. trogontherii) was perhaps the largest one in the family — growing up to 13 to 15 feet tall.  

·       The ears of a woolly mammoth were shorter than the modern elephant’s ears.  Like their thick coat of fur, their shortened ears were an important cold-weather adaptation because it minimized frostbite and heat loss.

·       Scientists can discern a woolly mammoth’s age from the rings of its tusk, like looking at the rings of a tree. The tusk yields more finite detail than a tree trunk, revealing a major line for each year and a line for the weeks and days in between. Scientists can even tell the season when a woolly mammoth died as the darker increments correspond to summers. The thickness or thinness of the rings indicate the health of the mammoth during that time; the tusk would grow more during favorable conditions.

·       The woolly mammoth was not the only “woolly” type of animal. The woolly rhinoceros, also known as the Coelodonta, co-existed with the woolly mammoth, walking the Earth during the Pleistocene epoch. Like the woolly mammoth, the woolly rhino adapted to the cold with a furry coat, was depicted by human ancestors in cave paintings and became extinct around the same time.

·       Cave paintings drawn by ice age humans show the important relationship they had with the woolly mammoths. The Rouffignac cave in France has 158 depictions of mammoths, making up about 70% of the represented animals that date back to the Upper Paleolithic period. There is also evidence of the use of bones and tusks by humans to create portable art objects, shelters, tools, furniture and even burials.