Extinct Species, features and articles | Educational Science

Mar 8, 2024

Colossus the enormous 'oddball' whale is not the biggest animal to ever live, scientists say

A weird extinct whale with a plump body and tiny limbs isn't the heaviest animal to ever live after all, a new study has claimed, bringing with it a whale of a debate. Last year, a team of researchers unveiled Perucetus colossus, a 39-million-year-old whale from Peru with an estimated...

Mar 12, 2024

Courtship cut short for termites trapped in 38 million-year-old amber fossil

A rare piece of amber has preserved the mating behavior of 38 million-year-old termites, researchers have revealed. The amber, or fossilized tree resin, holds the oldest and only described pair of Electrotermes affinis termites and reveals that these long-extinct insects likely engaged in the same mating behavior as termites that...

Oct 19, 2004

Surviving Extinction: Where Woolly Mammoths Endured

Like an Ice Age version of Land of the Lost, a group of woolly mammoths survived mass extinctions on their own island hideaway. The majority of mammoths died out about 11,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene era. But on St. Paul Island, one of the Pribolofs 300...

Dec 19, 2005

Decoding of Mammoth Genome Might Lead to Resurrection

Scientists have mapped part of the genome of the woolly mammoth, a huge mammal that's been extinct for about 10,000 years. The breakthrough could lead to recreating the creatures. A team led by Hendrik Poinar at McMaster University unlocked secrets of the animal's nuclear DNA by working with a well-preserved...

Jul 6, 2006

Beastly Colors: Mammoth Blondes and Really Hairy Brunettes

Museum dioramas typically portray mammoths as having shaggy brown coats, but some of the hairy beasts might have been blonde, raven-haired or red-bodied in real life, thanks to a gene that controls hair color in humans and other mammals. By examining DNA extracted from a mammoth bone frozen in Siberian...

Jun 7, 2007

Humans Had Help Finishing Off Woolly Mammoths

Humans might have finished off the woolly mammoths, but the genetics of the giants apparently helped them decline well beforehand, scientists now find. The woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) was coated in hair up to 20 inches long and possessed extremely long, curved tusks up to 16 feet in length. The...

Sep 27, 2007

Woolly Mammoth Hair Yields 'Fantastic' DNA

Hair is a better source of ancient DNA than bone or muscle, a new study involving woolly mammoth hair suggests. The main problem with things like bone is that it contains real DNA from the source, but also a load of DNA that is undesirable, said study team member Tom...

Mar 31, 2008

Study: Humans Drove Final Nail into Mammoth Coffin

Humans may have struck the final blow that killed the woolly-mammoth, but climate change seems to have played a major part in setting up the end-game, according to a new study. Though mammoth populations declined severely around 12,000 years ago, they didn't completely disappear until around 3,600 years ago. Scientists...

Jun 9, 2008

Woolly Mammoths Existed in Two Distinct Groups

Two genetically distinct groups of woolly mammoths once roamed northern Siberia, a new study suggests, with one group dying out long before humans showed up. The finding suggests humans were not the only reason for the beasts' demise, as some have suggested. Scientists had long thought that woolly mammoths were...

Sep 4, 2008

Mammoth Mystery: The Beasts' Final Years

Woolly mammoths' last stand before extinction in Siberia wasn't made by natives — rather, the beasts had American roots, researchers have discovered. Woolly mammoths once roamed the Earth for more than a half-million years, ranging from Europe to Asia to North America. These Ice Age giants vanished from mainland Siberia...

May 3, 2010

How Woolly Mammoths Survived Arctic Cold

The lumbering, shaggy-haired woolly mammoth once thrived in the frigid Arctic plains despite having originally migrated from a more tropical climate. A new study has found tiny genetic mutations that changed the way oxygen was delivered by its blood could be responsible for its tolerance to the cold climate. The...

Nov 2, 2011

Mammoth Mystery: What Killed Off the Woolly Beast?

The culprits behind the extinctions of a number of ice age giants have now been identified — woolly rhinos were apparently done in by climate change, while ancient bison were downed by both climate and human influences. However, whatever drove woolly mammoths extinct remains elusive. Giant mammals such as saber-toothed...

Nov 8, 2011

Baby Mammoth Innards Revealed in X-Ray Images

High-tech scans of two baby mammoths pulled from the Siberian permafrost reveal that one, originally identified as male, was in fact a female. In addition, the scans showed major skeletal differences between the two mammoths, perhaps representing evolutionary change in the mammoth lineage. A lot of what we've done with...

Nov 8, 2011

Skin and Bones: Inside Baby Mammoths

Lyuba (Image credit: International Mammoth Committee; CT scans by Ford Motor Company, USA, and Centre hospitalier Emile Roux, Le Puy-en-Velay, France.)Lyuba, a baby mammoth that suffocated in thick mud 42,000 years ago, gets the high-tech treatment with this computed tomography (CT) scan. Khroma (Image credit: International Mammoth Committee; CT scans...

Dec 8, 2011

Woolly Mammoths Could Be Cloned Someday, Scientist Says

Woolly mammoths — shaggy, long-extinct relatives of modern elephants — could be easier to clone than one might think, researchers say. Still, even if any such efforts succeed, they might take decades to accomplish, not the five years in which scientists from Russia and Japan reportedly have said they can...