Woolly Mammoth Profile
Around 90 to 100 million years ago, while dinosaurs still very much dominated the landscape, a limestone formation developed in what is now France. Sometime around the extinction of the dinosaurs, water began to push its way through this formation, carving out channels and underground riverine systems through the rock.
These rivers would eventually run dry, and the remaining tunnels aired out for several million years. The reign of the dinosaurs gave way to the rise of mammals, and these caves became home to various species of such animals throughout history.
About 13,000 years ago, modern humans entered these caves and began drawing on the walls, leaving a record of what they saw outside. In one of these drawings, 65 animal species are represented, including vast herds of Woolly Mammoths.
Woolly Mammoth Facts Overview
| Habitat: | Grasslands |
| Location: | Northern Eurasia and North America |
| Lifespan: | Probably 60 years |
| Size: | Up to 3.5m (11.5ft) |
| Weight: | Around 9 tons in large males |
| Colour: | Dark fur, some rare light-coloured individuals |
| Diet: | Grasses and forbs |
| Predators: | Humans |
| Top Speed: | Unknown |
| No. of Species: | 1 |
| Conservation Status: | Extinct |
Woolly mammoths hold a dear place in our hearts, and in no small part due to the fact that until very, very recently, we ate quite a lot of them. But more than this, they represent the last in a long line of enormous European megafauna, and incredible arctic warriors whose adaptations and specialisation allowed them to survive where almost nothing else could.
Sadly, this specialisation likely led to them struggling to adapt to a changing climate, and the growing success of a hyper-aggressive predatory ape into the continent didn’t help, either.
Interesting Woolly Mammoth Facts
1. The final mammoth
As we’ll see, the genus Mammuthus was just one of many in the elephant family. Mammoths were once plentiful and date back to around 5 million years ago in Ethiopia, which, incidentally is roughly the time and the place of the earliest human ancestor known.
So, humans and mammoths share a history as old as both genera are, and this history, for the mammoth, at least, ended relatively recently, when the last of the mainland mammoths, a woolly mammoth, died around 10,000 years ago.
However, a subpopulation of woolly mammoths held out significantly longer, on an isolated Russian island, likely cut off by the retreating sea ice, and remains discovered there date back to as recently as 2000BC. 1
2. They’re the best-known extinct mega beast
Woolly mammoths, therefore, are the freshest mammoth remains discovered by science. But there are plenty of other factors that affect how detailed the information is that we receive.
On account of their living in cold regions, mammoths have, on multiple occasions, been found frozen in the ice, with tissues so well preserved that they still have blood in them. Stomachs still have food in them, teeth with seeds embedded, and tusks with hormones still recognisable.
This amount of preservation means we know a huge amount about their diets, their growth rates and their reproductive cycles.
We know that, like elephants, their molars are replaced over time, and unlike our two sets of teeth, they had six, to combat the wear that must have occurred when chewing such rough plant matter. These molars were the most complex and specialised of any elephant.
We know from hormone profiles that the males would have experienced musth: the furious and painful hormonal cycle that modern elephants go through when ready to mate. 2 3 4
3. They’re cold-weather elephants
Mammoths are often differentiated from elephants on two counts: first of all, they’re all extinct (for now). Secondly, they’re a different genus than the remaining elephant species. But taxonomically, they only slightly differ, in that they’re the same family, and even the same subfamily and tribe.
Mammoths are simply another genus of elephants, and if this sounds strange, consider that Asian elephants are more closely related to extinct mammoths than they are to African elephants!
While they were clearly very common in France, it’s worth mentioning that at the time, the South of the country wasn’t quite the Mediterranean escape it is now. The Earth was in the middle of the Ice Age, and you couldn’t even see Britain and Scandinavia under almost 4km of ice. So, animals in Europe were different than they are now.
Woolly mammoths in particular were cold weather specialists, and for this reason, they had some very different adaptations than their equatorial cousins.
4. They had smaller appendages
African elephants are known for their enormous ears. All the better to hear you with, of course, but their main purpose is as a heat sink. It gets pretty hot in the savanna, and with a volume as large as they are, they need a way to increase their surface area so they don’t boil inside their own skin.
Huge ears are a great way to release body heat, and that’s exactly what you don’t want to do in the Arctic. So, woolly mammoths had much smaller ears and tails, to reduce this heat loss.
5. And fur
Unsurprisingly, given their name, they also had thick shaggy coats. Their outer guard hairs were up to 30cm (12 inches) long, and protected a denser, fluffier layer of fur, much as you’d find in any modern Arctic species.
Their entire bodies were covered in this fur. And it’s a good job, too, since temperatures would routinely hit -50°C. 5
6. They had big tusks
Tusks are elongated teeth that protrude from the jaw. They may come from the top or the bottom, and in many animals, these are canines, but in elephants, they’re the upper incisors.
Compared with modern elephants, woolly mammoth tusks were significantly longer, at up to 4.2 meters, and a lot more curved. Both males and females had these huge protrusions, unlike their closest relatives in Asia. 6
7. They had extra fat
Woolly mammoths were likely the most specialized species of the elephant there has ever been, and another way they were well adapted to their local climate was in their ability to store fat in their necks.
This is a strategy seen in other animals such as bison and serves not only as a source of nutrients during hard times but also as a useful layer of insulation on the back of the neck, where a lot of body heat would otherwise be released. 7
8. And this fat was tasty
Research suggests that the fatty acids found in this hump would have represented a fantastic source of nutrients for Palaeolithic hunters, and cave remains corroborates this.
Horses, cave hyenas and woolly mammoths represent the most common remains found in early human cave dwellings, and it’s thought that one medium-sized woolly mammoth would have enough of it to nourish over fifty humans of the day for three months.
Living in such cold climates would also have made refrigeration of the meat a trivial matter. And, as humans got better at hunting, large mammal populations got smaller. 8
9. Humans helped drive them to extinction
There are controversies around a lot of the extinctions of large mammal lineages around the time when the woolly mammoth went extinct. Much of the hesitation to accept human-driven extinction comes from the simple fact that it isn’t a very nice thing to believe.
But there is also legitimate scientific research that backs up the idea that it wasn’t only humans that led to mammoth extinction.
As mammoth numbers dropped, human civilisation began. It’s thought that this correlation has a causative relationship, as agriculture could have been inspired by the dwindling mammal populations.
Regardless, this dwindling likely had both a human and a climatic cause, as the ice age moved over to warmer weather, grasslands became swamps and food for the mammoths became scarce. 9
10. Some people are trying to bring them back
Since we have such close relatives walking among us still, and because the tissue remains of the woolly mammoth are of such high quality, many think we are only a few short technological leaps in our progress toward being able to bring the woolly mammoth back.
However, many consider this a fantasy and many of those who believe it’s feasible are concerned with the lack of available habitat for such a huge and significant herbivore.
Siberia may have enough space and vegetation to home a population of mammoths, and if so, the cascade of ecological effects could bring plenty of benefits, as well as drive some high-profile energy into conservation as a whole.
Woolly Mammoth Fact-File Summary
Scientific Classification
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Mammalia |
| Order: | Proboscidea |
| Family: | Elephantidae |
| Genus: | Mammuthus |
| Species: | primigenius |
Fact Sources & References
- MICHAEL PRICE (2017), “The last, lonely woolly mammoths faced a ‘genomic meltdown‘”, Science.org.
- Sarah Zhang (2019), “What Happens to Meat When You Freeze It for 35,000 Years”, The Atlantic.
- “About Mammoth Molars”, Fossilera.
- Ashley Strickland (2023), “Scientists unlock new secrets from a male woolly mammoth tusk”, CNN.
- “Woolly Mammoth”, National Geographic Kids.
- “What a mammoth’s tusk can tell us about its life”, National Park Service.
- Susie Spikol(2019), “Mammoth!”, Northern Woodlands.
- Guil-Guerrero (2013), “The Fat from Frozen Mammals Reveals Sources of Essential Fatty Acids Suitable for Palaeolithic and Neolithic Humans”, Sci Hub.
- Jordan Mendoza (2021), “Climate change, not humans, was reason woolly mammoths went extinct, research suggests”, USA Today.