Mammoths in Siberia

Woolly Mammoth. Artist: Caroll.L. Fenton. Source and copyright: Patricia Vickers-Rich.

The discovery of frozen mammoth carcasses in the permafrost of Siberia has attracted an enormous amount of public interest in recent decades. Although remains have been excavated for over a century, the discovery of a complete baby mammoth in 1977 and its subsequent world tour led to a marked increase in research into these animals.

Mammoths were a little smaller than modern elephants, with small ears and a thick coat of long black hair. They flourished in Siberia at the height of the last ice age when that region had low precipitation and consequently, was covered with steppe-like grasslands (rather than ice). With the end of the ice age, the climate changed. Increased precipitation (snow) turned the steppe into boggy tundra, and this, perhaps with some assistance from human hunters, resulted in the extinction of the mammoth about 11,000 years ago.