ishibashi seiichi/Shutterstock
Scientists have long wondered if the wooly mammoth went extinct due to high levels of inbreeding.
Johann Mader/Shutterstock
It is difficult to distinguish between elephant and mammoth ivory.
Animals that shared the landscape with humans disappeared as the ice age ended.
Mauricio Antón/Wikimedia Commons
A forensic technique more often used at modern crime scenes identified blood residue from large extinct animals on spearpoints and stone tools used by people who lived in the Carolinas millennia ago.
Blue Sky Studios/AP
All the evidence points to one thing: humans and woolly mammoths certainly lived side by side. But did humans hunt mammoths too?
NFSA
‘De-extinction’ seems like a way to save dying or dead species - but in reality it’s an expensive and impractical waste of time.
Genetic material found in permafrost sediments from the Yukon contains rich information about ancient ecosystems.
(Julius Csotonyi/Government of Yukon)
Permafrost in the Yukon is a treasure trove of ancient environmental DNA, but climate change threatens these rich historical archives.
Shutterstock
While the prospect of reviving extinct species has long been discussed, advances in genome editing have now brought such dreams close to reality.
Current view of the steppe mammoth, an ancestor to the woolly mammoth.
Beth Zaiken/Centre for Palaeogenetics
Our results have revolutionised the previously held view of the evolution of mammoths.
A prehistoric woman with a child have left behind the world’s longest trackway.
Some 13,000 years ago, an adult carrying in a child walked 1.5km in mud at great speed in the presence of hungry predators.
The Zimovs take some permafrost depth readings.
© Charlotte Wrigley
The Zimovs want to restore the prehistoric ‘mammoth steppe’ ecosystem and see if it slows down – or even reverses – melting permafrost.
Unlike mammoths, bison survived in Alaska at the end of the last ice age.
Hans Veth/Unsplash
The historical record is full of surprises – and it could encourage conservationists to think more creatively.
Extinction of the woolly mammoth and other megafauna caused surviving animals to go their separate ways.
Wikimedia
After the woolly mammoth and other megafauna became extinct, surviving animals mingled less. This has big implications for modern conservation.
Catmando/Shutterstock
Scientists have worked out a new way to scan beneath the ground for footprints – and it’s revealing traces of an ancient world.
Mammoths went extinct tens of thousands of years ago, but trade in their ivory is threatening their living elephant cousins.
EPA/FREDERICK VON ERICHSEN
Melting Siberian permafrost is exposing long-dead mammoths, creating a new trade in mammoth ivory.
The now-extinct giant beaver once lived from Florida to Alaska. It weighed as much as 100 kilograms, roughly the same as a small black bear.
Illustrated by Luke Dickey/Western University
Scientists studied the fossilized bones of giant beavers to understand what they ate and whether the species could keep up with environmental change.
An ice-sheet in Greenland’s Inglefield Land is hiding the Hiawatha crater.
Natural History Museum of Denmark, Cryospheric Sciences Lab, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA
Meteorite impacts have fundamentally shaped the history of our planet.
Shutterstock
A 20-year-old experiment is testing whether filling the Arctic tundra with animals could keep carbon trapped in the ground.
Giant sloths: killed by rainy weather?
Kamraman/Wikimedia Commons
A burst of wet weather could have helped to kill off mammoths and other large herbivores, by transforming much of the world’s grasslands into bogs and forests and depriving megafauna of food.
Would a ban on mammoth ivory endanger or save the elephant?
Pixabay
People arguing that a ban on mammoth ivory would help save elephants from extinction are wrong. Here’s why.
FlyingPuffin
Animals that couldn’t adapt to rapid warming quickly succumbed.