Researchers created the maps by analyzing the teeth of hundreds of small rodents from across Alaska held in the museum’s collections.
Researchers pieced together the mammoth’s journey up to that point by analyzing isotopic signatures in its tusk from the elements strontium and oxygen, which were matched with maps predicting isotope variations across Alaska. Scientists knew that the mammoth died on Alaska’s North Slope above the Arctic Circle, where its remains were excavated by a team that included UAF’s Dan Mann and Pam Groves, who are among the co-authors of the study. “Mother Nature doesn’t usually offer up such convenient and life-long records of an individual’s life.” “From the moment they’re born until the day they die, they’ve got a diary and it’s written in their tusks,” said Pat Druckenmiller, a paleontologist and director of the UA Museum of the North. When the tusk was split lengthwise for sampling, these growth bands looked like stacked ice cream cones, offering a chronological record of an entire mammoth’s life. Mammoths steadily added new layers on a daily basis throughout their lives. The detailed isotope analyses they made are possible because of the way that mammoth tusks grew. Researchers at the Alaska Stable Isotope Facility, where Wooller is director, split the 6-foot tusk lengthwise and generated about 400,000 microscopic data points using a laser and other techniques. “It’s just amazing what we were able to see and do with this data,” said co-lead author Clément Bataille, an assistant professor and researcher in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences in the Faculty of Science, who led the modeling effort in collaboration with Amy Willis at the University of Washington. “It visited many parts of Alaska at some point during its lifetime, which is pretty amazing when you think about how big that area is.” “It’s not clear-cut if it was a seasonal migrator, but it covered some serious ground,” said University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher Matthew Wooller, senior and co-lead author of the paper. An outline of the mammoth’s life is detailed in the new issue of the journal Science. By generating and studying isotopic data in the mammoth’s tusk, they were able to match its movements and diet with isotopic maps of the region.įew details have been known about the lives and movements of woolly mammoths, and the study offers the first evidence that they traveled vast distances. Scientists gathered unprecedented details of its life through analysis of a 17,000-year-old fossil from the University of Alaska Museum of the North. An international research team has retraced the astonishing lifetime journey of an Arctic woolly mammoth, which covered enough of the Alaska landscape during its 28 years to almost circle the Earth twice.
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