Wooly Mammoth Skull, Tusks and Teeth
This Woolly Mammoth skull and tusks were found by Eldorado Placers on the 60 Mile river. It is very rare to find a skull and tusks intact like this as the skull is porous and very fragile. This artifact was given to the Yukon Government paleontologist. At the time it was hoped that it could be displayed at the Beringa Centre in Whitehorse
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/huge-mammoth-skull-found-in-yukon-gold-fields-1.938830
WOOLLY MAMMOTH
For many people, the woolly mammoth is the prime example of an ice age mammal. These large, furry elephants were perfectly adapted to living on the Mammoth Steppe of ice age Yukon. About the size of an African elephant, a woolly mammoth stood a little over three metres tall at the shoulder and consumed more than 200 kilograms of grass each day.
The discoveries of complete frozen woolly mammoth carcasses have revealed detailed glimpses into the life and appearance of these iconic animals. Some preserved physical characteristics can even be linked back to specific adaptations to life in the cold — for example, thick fur, small ears and a short tail were all adaptations to minimize heat loss.
Woolly mammoths, like many giant animals of the Ice Age, went extinct as the climate warmed at the end of the last glacial period. Fossils from North America and Asia indicate woolly mammoths disappeared from the mainland around 12,000 years ago. Remarkably, they managed to survive on small Arctic islands off northern Siberia until around 4,000 years ago.
Yukon's Woolly Mammoth History
The long, curved tusks of woolly mammoths are probably the most immediately recognized ice age fossil from Yukon. A single tusk from an adult male can stretch over 3.5 metres long and weigh more than 100 kilograms. These tusks may have been used for display, defense, or possibly to sweep away snow to get at grass in the winter.
Tusks preserve a wealth of information about a mammoth's life because they are a lot like trees, with layer upon layer of growth rings forming over time. By studying these growth rings, scientists can learn about a mammoth's health through its entire lifespan, the climate it lived in, and where it migrated to and from.
Mammoth teeth, or molars, are common fossils in Yukon. These mammoth molars are very distinctive, with vertical hard enamel plates that formed a flat grinding surface for breaking down tough grasses. Analysis of mammoth baby molars from Old Crow, Yukon revealed that young mammoths may have nursed on their mothers' milk for much longer than today's African elephants—nursing almost exclusively until about three years of age. This prolonged nursing may have been an adaptation to help survive the long dark winters, when food was scarce. On the other hand, maybe young mammoths preferred to stay close to their mothers, so as to avoid falling prey to a hungry Beringian lion or other predator?
The first mammoths crossed Beringia into North America around 1 million years ago. DNA extracted from fossil bones reveals that the woolly mammoth evolved in Yukon and Alaska around 300,000 years ago from those ancestors. They eventually spread back across Beringia and into Europe. Woolly mammoths also had a close cousin, the larger-bodied Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbianus), which lived further south in North America. Recent genetic evidence is suggesting that woolly and Columbian mammoths interbred in the regions where they overlapped.
Recent Discoveries
Did you know?
Scientists have found evidence that like modern elephants, mammoths sometimes used their tusks as a "nose-rack" for resting their trunk.
They would use the right or left tusk depending on whether they were right- or left-"handed".
Thanks in part to the amazing preservational powers of permafrost, the North's natural deep freezer, geneticists have come tantalizingly close to resurrecting the woolly mammoth! We now know the complete sequence of mammoth DNA—their genome—including the DNA sequence for mammoth hair colour (not all mammoths were brunettes!) and blood proteins. But so far a living, breathing mammoth is still only possible in science fiction.
This is the size of a woolly mammoth tooth.
The craft use of any kind of ivory is potentially controversial. We have covered at least one ivory-related project, before, about the use of antique ivory piano keys in scrimshaw, but generally we have steered clear of ivory (I imagine) because it’s such a sensitive and complex subject. Personally, though I often admire the beauty of carved ivory, I have avoided owning or working with it for ethical reasons. On the other hand, if a junk piano with antique ivory keys were to fall into my hands, I would have no problem salvaging and working with them. Indeed, it would seem wasteful not to do so.
There are several alternative / substitute materials available to a person interested in working with ivory. One of these is so-called “fossil” ivory, which is harvested from mammoth remains preserved in Siberian permafrost. Per a 2009 story in The New York Times, “[t]he tusks are more abundant than many people in the West realize. Encased in an upper layer of Siberia’s permafrost are the remains of an estimated 150 million mammoths that lived from 3,600 to 400,000 years ago.”
A 2010 report in the specialist journal Pachyderm describes the annual mammoth tusk harvest: “Every year, from mid-June, when the tundra melts, until mid-September, hundreds if not thousands of mostly local people scour the tundra in northern Siberia looking for mammoth tusks. All are Russians as foreigners cannot obtain a permit to collect tusks in the field. Some tusks are easily seen on the banks of rivers while others are detected on the flat lands.” Further, the report claims, “[i]n recent years, 60 tonnes of mammoth tusks have been exported annually from Russia, mostly to Hong Kong for carving in mainland China.”
Whatever the larger implications of the mammoth ivory trade may be, it has created a practical forensic problem for law enforcement. Buying mammoth ivory is, generally, legal, while buying elephant ivory, generally, is not. But when you’re a customs official staring at a crate full of tusks, how do you know which is which?
Cross sections of elephant (left) and mammoth tusks (right) with outer Schreger lines marked, showing characteristic angle difference.
For an agent “in the field,” the simplest and most useful test is based on natural grain lines in elephant and mammoth tusks called “Schreger lines.” Tusk cross sections can be scanned on the glass of a photocopier, and the angles between Schreger lines near the surface of the tusk measured with ruler, pen, and protractor:
When averages are used to represent the angles in the individual samples, a clear separation between extinct and extant proboscideans is observed. All the elephant samples had averages above 100 degrees, and all the extinct proboscideans had angle averages below 100 degrees.
Further, mammoth ivory sometimes displays characteristic staining in visible and ultraviolet spectra. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory’s Ivory Identification Guide, linked below, has more details, and is a great resource in general for anyone who may be considering working with mammoth ivory.
Ivory Identification Guide – U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Forensics Laboratory