Scientists have turned to crowdsourcing to fund an effort that could help them determine when the woolly mammoth vanished from mainland Alaska.
Matthew Wooller of the University of Alaska Fairbanks poses amid woolly mammoth tusks at the university.
His plan involves 1,500 mammoth bones, teeth and tusks housed in Fairbanks at the UA Museum of the North. Donated by explorer Otto Geist and many gold miners over the last 100 years, the mammoth remains are a treasure that would become much more useful to scientists if they knew when the animals were alive.
Before the details, a little more on what the contest might do for our knowledge of an iconic creature. The giant relatives of African and Asian elephants — but shaggy, with longer, curvier tusks and smaller ears — woolly mammoths are a symbol of the far North that went extinct not very long ago. About a decade ago, researchers, including Wooller, found that mammoths on Alaska’s St. Paul Island lived until about 5,600 years ago. Those island mammoths seem to have persisted more than 5,000 years longer than other Alaska mammoths.
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