Mammoths and mastadons exited teh scene at or near the same period as the last great extinction of so many other North American animals. We nce had horses and camels here, along with a gazillion other species whcih were wiped clean ina sudden or brief moment in time. Speculate on what caused this extinction all you wnat, but it is laughable to blame a lack of grass for any extinctions anywhere ever. My 11 year old kid can come up with better than this.

Mammoth may aid climate research

Lincoln College Mammoth could provide insight into how modern animals will react to climate change

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Friday, January 4, 2008

By CHRIS YOUNG

of Gatehouse News Service
LINCOLN – Parts of a woolly mammoth discovered in Logan County in 2005 may provide clues to how modern birds and animals could react to climate change.

Jeffrey Saunders, curator and chairman of geology at the Illinois State Museum, said the discovery of the Lincoln College Mammoth by student Judd McCullum in 2005 surprised scientists when it turned out to have lived much more recently than anyone thought.

Scientists thought the tusk and tooth would date to about 22,000 years ago, a time consistent when mammoths and mastodons were roaming Illinois and glaciers were still part of the landscape.

Those discoveries along with another tooth and a partial jaw discovered recently by McCullom’s professor, Dennis Campbell, were found to have been from an animal living in Logan County about 13,500 years ago, well after the last glaciers retreated north.

Woolly mammoths are supposed to have inhabited the cold, harsh and mostly treeless plain at the edge of the ice sheets. The Lincoln College mammoth lived more than 400 miles away from that environment and probably never saw glacial ice.

Pollen records show trees such as black ash dominating at that time, as spruce – normally associated with colder climates – was starting to decline.

“The environment is out of whack according to conventional wisdom,” Saunders said.

Other mammoth discoveries with late dates have left scientists scrambling to explain why the creatures were still around. Usually, the explanation comes around to some sort of refuge, or microclimate, being present where Ice Age conditions persisted, possibly because of wind coming off glaciers that kept a region cool.

Now, Saunders says, the refuge explanation may not be necessary. The mammoths may simply have stayed where they were born.

“It was a robust, long-lived male,” Saunders of the Lincoln College mammoth. “If it wanted to move, it could have.

“It made do.”

So what was the mammoth doing in a moist, even swampy environment in Logan County so late in the Ice Age?

The answer may give scientists some insight into how present-day birds and animals react to climate change, a hot topic among researchers, politicians and the general public.

Saunders says research shows DNA of Arctic foxes that lived in central Europe during the Ice Age does not appear in Arctic foxes living in far north regions today. That could mean the foxes living in Europe failed to adapt to changing climate and did not simply move north as the ice sheets fell back. They died out, and their distinct DNA with them.

Could the same be said for the Lincoln College Mammoth? Did mammoths and other large Pleistocene mammals stay put and fail to migrate with changing conditions?

If that turns out to be the case, present-day animals could face similar circumstances.

“It is unlikely that animals will be willing to move northward as climates move northward,” he said. “They will be overwhelmed by what happens to them.”

Even if animals are willing to migrate, some plants upon which they depend may not make the transition to new locales, especially if the soil or other factors do not favor their growth, even if temperature and rainfall do.

There are three main theories as to why large Pleistocene Era mammals became extinct. Most scientists believe climate change, hunting by early human inhabitants, some kind of disease – or perhaps a combination of these – spelled the end.

Seeking answers to all of these questions will make for plenty of work for scientists for years to come.

“You don’t get bored because something new always comes about,” said Saunders, who marks 30 years with the Illinois State Museum in 2008. “That’s the way science works.”