Woolly mammoths

The woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, evolved in north-eastern Siberia roughly 700,000 years ago from the steppe mammoth, Mammuthus trogontherii, a larger, less hairy animal. The mammoth genus itself began in Africa about five million years ago and spread north. Woolly mammoths stood about 3 metres at the shoulder, weighed up to roughly 6 tonnes, and carried long curved tusks, a high-domed skull, small ears and a short tail that limited heat loss. They had long guard hair over a dense underwool, a fat store on the back and a layer of skin fat.³²

Mammoths grazed on grasses and sedges on the cold dry plain scientists call the mammoth steppe, which stretched from Spain across Siberia and Beringia into Canada during the Ice Age cycles. Frozen carcasses preserved in permafrost give an unusually rich picture. The baby mammoth Lyuba, found in the Yamal Peninsula in 2007, is about 42,000 years old, and in 2021 DNA from mammoth molars more than a million years old, from Siberian permafrost, became the oldest DNA ever sequenced. Genome studies show woolly mammoths carried changes to genes for fat storage, hair and the sensing of cold.²¹

Mammoths were hunted by people, who built shelters from their bones, but climate change and loss of steppe habitat also reduced their numbers. Most mainland populations died out by about 10,000 years ago, and a last group survived on an Arctic island for several thousand years more.³