Everything you should know about mammoths

Just as the Jurassic period brings dinosaurs to mind, when we speak of the Ice Age we usually think of mammoths. Indeed, the most distinctive animal of the Ice Age was this extinct elephant.

The primitive animal known simply as the mammoth should correctly be called the woolly mammoth. This species is the last in the evolutionary line of mammoths.

Woolly mammoths lived during the last few hundred thousand years of the Ice Age. Some researchers think they evolved somewhere in eastern Siberia 700-800,000 years ago, others think they emerged only around 400,000 years ago. Most mammoths became extinct about 11,000 years ago, but the last populations disappeared only about 4,000 years ago. Their body size was similar to that of modern-day elephants. The tallest were nearly 4 metres tall. The smallest were barely more than 2.5 m tall. Their huge tusks are the upper incisors, which evolved to enormous sizes during evolution. The largest mammoth tusk found so far is 5 metres long.

What and how much did a mammoth consume?

It is an interesting experiment to calculate how much and what kind of food was sufficient for the mammoth to survive in the given climatic conditions. We can use the stomach contents or preserved faeces of found mammoth mummies as a guide, while, as a modern example, we can take the dietary habits of elephants. This suggests that the mammoth’s “ration” was 550, or, according to some researchers, 1100 pound a day. The community of life that produced this amount of food is called the mammoth steppe. This habitat could have been home to a variety of plant communities with different climatic conditions that are difficult to compare with today’s plant associations. There are no such habitats left on Earth.

In the north, the climate was very dry, very cold in winter and the ground was permanently frozen. Because of the drought, snowfall was rare and scarce, with some precipitation only in spring. Thus, these areas could only develop a drought-tolerant herbaceous vegetation, rich in perennial grasses and sedges. Trees, pines, birches, willows and alders also occurred in the river valleys.

However, the mammoths ventured further south, where higher rainfall and a milder climate meant that other deciduous trees were also present, and more warm-weather herbaceous plants were found.

The “last journey” of the mammoths

The greatest distribution of woolly mammoths dates back to 15-25 thousand years ago, when, taking advantage of low sea levels, they migrated to North America and the future Wrangel Island adjacent to eastern Siberia. However, this ‘mammoth optimum’ did not last long. At the end of the glacial phase, around 12,000 years ago, as the climate warmed, the mammoths’ habitat was significantly reduced by changes in vegetation, gradually moving further north. The drop in available food also caused a reduction in body size: there are instances of small mammoth remains of little more than 2.5 metres in height found in northern Siberia. Rising sea levels due to melting ice sheets cut off the mammoths of Wrangel Island from the outside world, and within a few thousand years, as the habitat became too narrow, these giants evolved into dwarf mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius vrangeliensis). The smallest animals were only around 1.5 metres tall. The age of the last remains is 3,700 years, so mammoths were still alive when the Egyptian pyramids were built!

What was a mammoth like?

The woolly mammoths were similar in shape and size to modern-day elephants. They were most closely related to the Indian elephant, which is no coincidence, as they were more closely related to the African elephant. Thanks to the ice-frozen fossils, we know a great deal about the body structure of woolly mammoths. Their trunks were slightly different from those of modern-day elephants. Their tails and ears were much smaller to adapt to the cold climate. Their coats consisted of two types of fur, a lower woolly layer about 10 cm long and a covering of hairs up to 1 metre long. Their colour varied from light to dark brown. The layer of fat stored under their thick skin could be up to 9 cm thick. On the neck and back in a hump-like deposit they could accumulate a layer of fat even thicker than this. On their backside, a small skinfold protected the anus from the cold. They used their teeth to easily grind grasses even with high silicic acid content.

Where did the mammoths live?

Woolly mammoths evolved in north-eastern Siberia in the Günz or Mindel glaciation. They reached their widest distribution in the last (Würm) glaciation. At this time, they populated the ice-free parts of Europe and all of Asia except the south and southeast. During the Würm, they also migrated to North America, where they lived in large herds, except in the southern half of the continent.