Pelvic bone of a 15,000-year-old wooly mammoth found in a soybean field in Michigan

Farmers in Michigan have come across what appears to be the pelvic bone of a wooly mammoth that roamed some 15,000 years ago – they were digging in the soybean field when they unearthed an item that looked like a bent fence post, caked with mud. It turned out to be part of a pelvis from an ancient woolly mammoth.
This has been reported in nzherald.co.nz dated 4 October 2015.

A team of paleontologists from the University of Michigan and an excavator have managed to recover nearly 20 percent of the animal's skeleton. Apart from the pelvis, the team has found the skull and two tusks, along with numerous vertebrae, ribs and both shoulder blades.
Study of the bones could provide a clue of when humans arrived in the Americas. As indicated by Daniel Fisher, the scientist who led the dig, it is possible that the animal was killed by humans who were here. They could have killed it and stashed the meat so that they could come back later for it. Three boulders the size of basketballs found next to the remains could be evidence that these might have been used to anchor the carcass in a pond.
In the opinion of experts, mammoths and mastodons, another elephant-like creature, were common in North America before they disappeared around 11,700 years ago. So far, remains of about 300 mastodons and 30 mammoths have been discovered in Michigan but the latest find is more complete.
(Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org)

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Study reveals - global warming led to extinction of the Ice Age wooly mammoths

A study conducted by the University of Adelaide in Australia has concluded that it was global warming that led to the extinction of the wooly mammoths of the Ice Age - the mighty megafauna of the last Ice Age that included the woolly mammoths became extinct due to rapid climate-warming events.
This has been reported in zeenews.india.com dated 27 July 2015.

The study has found that during the unstable climate of the Late Pleistocene (about 60,000 to 12,000 years ago) there were sudden climate spikes called interstadials and these resulted in increased temperatures between four and 16 degrees Celsius within decades.
Survival was not easy for the large size animals like the woolly mammoths in these hot conditions because of the effects it had on their habitats and prey. As explained by one of the authors of the study - interstadials lead to dramatic shifts in global rainfall and vegetation patterns. The rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and the consequential warming effects can have a similar rate of change and could herald in another major phase of large mammal extinctions.
In the opinion of another paleogenetics of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark is that this study can be considered as a wake-up call.
(Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org)

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