WITH long curved tusks, shaggy dark hair and a humped back, Manny, the woolly mammoth in Ice Age movies, is one of the most adorable creatures computer graphics have given us in movies.

Resembling the elephant that all of us know so well (even if some of us have not seen an elephant in real life) the mammoth isn’t an animal hard to relate to. And it is a bit surprising that the last of these mammoths died and disappeared from earth some ten to 20 thousand years ago! How could this be? They weren’t as large or strange as the dinosaurs so why are they extinct? How was the earth different then from what it is today?

These and some more questions are going to be answered here as best as scientists have been able to tell us. So let’s travel to the Ice Age and meet the mammoths!

MAMMOTHS lived during the Ice Age and became extinct over a rather long period of time. They were thriving some 300,000 years ago and most of those who lived on the main large continents like northern Eurasia and North America died some 10 thousand years ago.

The remains of mammoths found indicate that the last ones were those in St. Paul Island, Alaska, 6,400 years ago and the furry species in Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean died just 4,000 years back.

Comparing cousins

Since elephants are as close to the mammoths as any living species today can be to its extinct genetic cousin, let’s look at some similarities between elephants and mammoths so that you can have a better idea of what these huge creatures were like.

Extinction: All mammoths are extinct while just two species of elephants are alive today — the African elephant and Indian elephant.

Fur: Elephants have short hairs in their fur that is not thick, while mammoths had thick fur coats with the hair at the top being as long as three metres!

Diet: Both are herbivorous — eating just vegetables.

Tusks: Mammoths usually had larger tusks than elephants. The tusks of mammoth curved towards its face, while elephant tusks shoot straight out from its face.

Ears: Mammoths had smaller ears than the elephants we have today. Elephants flap their large ears to dissipating excess heat, something mammoths didn’t have to do. The smaller ears of the mammoths could be kept close to their body and thus warm.

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Chordata

Order: Therapsida

Class: Mammalia

Order: Proboscidea

Family: Elephantidae

Tribe: Elephantini

Genus: Mammuthus

Earliest species: The flat-browed mammoths are believed to have lived in Africa, Europe and Asia about 5,000,000 years ago and the southern mammoth of Europe and Asia.

Later species: The imperial mammoth of western North America, the largest of all the mammoths, and the woolly Siberian mammoth of central Europe, northern Asia and North America.

To clone or not to clone…

Some scientists believe that they can clone the woolly mammoth because they became extinct relatively recently, and the well-preserved remains found of these creatures mean that scientists can one day harvest their DNA.

One of the mammoth remains found in a remote Russian island in the Arctic Ocean was so well preserved that blood it flowed freely from a 10,000- to 15,000-year-old creature! But how well-preserved the creature’s DNA was can’t be ascertained and, for cloning, intact DNA is needed.

Ian Wilmuth, the scientist responsible for Dolly, the world’s first cloned animal, thinks it is possible, but not easy. It will take a lot of time, money and the help of elephants, if at all scientists ever reach the cloning stage.

Extinction

There are several theories about how the mammoths became extinct. Some believed that as the Ice Age drew towards its end, rising temperature and changes in the environment must have led to both a loss of habitat as well as food supply for these creatures.

Some others believe that humans must have added to the problems of these woolly creatures by hunting them to extinction.

Some ancient cave paintings discovered show drawings of mammoths so human beings must have lived during its time and as the humans grew in numbers, those of the mammoths’ went down.

Not so big

• While the word ‘mammoth’ today implies something really, really big, the actual mammoths were big, but not really, really big!

• They were actually somewhat smaller than their modern cousins, the elephants. The imperial mammoths were 15 feet (4.6 metres) high at the shoulders and weighed more than eight tonnes (7,260 kg), exceptionally large ones reached 12 tonnes.

• Mammoths had long, curved tusks, as long as 16 feet and weighing as much as 150 pounds. First they grew a temporary set of tusks and later permanent ones grew, and the growth of this set was at a rate of about one to six inches per year.

• The head was big, though the ears were considerably smaller when compared the elephant’s. The mammoths had humpbacked body that sloped backwards from the shoulders.

• A sticking feature of these animals was their long hair, particularly at the back. This was to help them put up with the extreme cold weather they lived in. They had a thick fur undercoat, with long top hairs around three feet long!

• Mammoths also had shallow-rooted teeth, called hyspodants, and the molar teeth were arranged in plates.