Three
species of mammoths (genus
Mammuthus) lived on the mainland of the United
States at the end of the last Ice Age. These
were the Columbian mammoth (
M. columbi), Jefferson's
mammoth (
M. jeffersonii), and the woolly mammoth (
M. primigenius).
Of these, not only Jefferson's mammoth but also the
woolly mammoth has been known from the midwestern U.S.
Mammoths,
mastodons
and modern elephants, are members of the order Proboscidea. The mammoths are directly
associated to the breathing elephants, especially to the Asiatic elephant (
Elephas
maximus).
As adults these late-occuring mammoths stood between about 3 and 3.7 meters
(10-12 feet) at the shoulder and weighed between 5500 and 7300 kilograms (6-8
tons).
Mammoth Teeth
The teeth of mammoths
are quite individual. They are collected of a set of condensed enamel plates
that are detained together with cemented. These cemented plates make a very
tall, strong, and wear-resistant tooth. After a tooth erupts from the gum crack,
the mammoth uses it in grinding coarse vegetation like grass. This use causes
the tooth to build up a flat top with low enamel ridges where the plates have
been damaged.
The tall structure of these hypsodont (shallow-rooted) teeth make them very unwilling
to wear. This is important because mammoths are thought to have been chiefly
grass-eaters. Grass is a very hard textile to eat. It has small pieces of
silica (a glass-like substance) in its leaves. These pieces of silica act like
sandpaper grit and would wear away a less opposed to tooth very hurriedly.
Mammoths are recurrently found as fossils in the midwestern U.S.
Most often lonely teeth are found. Mammoth fossils are most common in areas
that were enclosed by savannas, grasslands, or tundra all through the last Ice
Age. This map shows some of the significant mammoth finds in the region.
Regarding 1.5 to 1.8 million years
ago the first mammoths entered North America. These
mammoths came from Eurasia, crossing the Bering
Strait at a time when sea level was lower than today. The first
mammoths from Eurasia belonged to a species called
M.
meridionalis. The descendants of this species of mammoth integrated both
the Columbian and Jefferson's mammoths. The woolly mammoths
evolved in Eurasia and came over the Bering
Strait much later (perhaps less than 500,000 years ago). Roughly
11,000 years ago all species of mammoths went extinct in North
America.
Find out more about this
extinction.
Although only bone and teeth of mammoths are sealed in the Midwestern U.S.,
the Illinois State
Museum also has a sample of mammoth
hair from Siberia.
This photograph shows a
sample of hair from the Yuribei Mammoth. The Yuribei Mammoth was institute
along the Yuribei River
on the Gyda Peninsula,
NW Siberia, Russia. It is a young adult, feminine mammoth. She was roofed with
a long and thick, brownish hair coat, an example of which is shown above.
Radiocarbon dating indicates that she lived about 11,000 years ago.
The Yuribei Mammoth was composed in 1979 by a multidisciplinary team in
place of three institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
The hair sample revealed here was accessible to the Illinois
State Museum
in 1991 by Dr. Gennady Baryshnikov, of the History of Faunas Department of the
Zoological Insitute, Russian
Academy of Sciences, St.
Petersburg.