Channel4.com Text Only

[ Text Only: Homepage ]
[ Graphical: Channel4 Homepage ]

Big Monster Dig

The Latton quarry mammoths

The Latton quarry mammoths | Mammoths | Resources

Mammoths

Long-tusked elephants
Mammoths were not all shaggy-furred denizens of cold places: they were a successful group of long-tusked elephants that inhabited the tropical, temperate and Arctic environments of Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, and there was not one mammoth species but several.

First evolving in Africa about five million years ago from an ancestor that also gave rise to living Asian and African elephants, mammoths survived throughout the Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs (see Timeline) and into remarkably recent times. The most recent known mammoths, from Wrangel Island in the Siberian Arctic, died out just 4,000 years ago.

The best-known and the biggest
The best-known mammoth species – the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) – had long, thick fur and, with a maximum height of 3.4 metres (11 feet), was small compared to some mammoth species. The probable ancestor of the woolly mammoth was Mammuthus trogontherii, often called the steppe mammoth because its fossils come from the open grassland environments called steppes. It was a rather different animal from the woolly mammoth, being less specialised for life in cold places and much taller. In fact, with a maximum height in the biggest males of 4.5 metres (14.75 feet), M. trogontherii was the biggest mammoth of them all. A mammoth 4.5 metres tall would have weighed over 10 tonnes, a weight equivalent to about 130 adult humans.

Like most other mammoths, M. trogontherii had a short, tall skull that supported huge spiraling tusks. Both males and females possessed these, but they were thicker and longer in males, reaching a maximum length of 5.2 metres (17 feet). Like living elephants, M. trogontherii would have used its tusks when fighting and as tools used in digging, pushing over trees, stripping bark and breaking branches.

Teeth and diet
Like all elephants, M. trogontherii had big molar teeth: the larger ones weighed over 5 kilogrammes each. Enamel ridges on the surface of each molar's crown provided the chewing surfaces, and by studying the height of the crown and size and number of the enamel ridges experts are able to work out the diet of extinct elephant species.

Because grass is particularly abrasive, grass-eating elephants have the tallest crowns and largest number of ridges. With around 18 to 20 ridges on a tall crown, M. trogontherii appears to have eaten mostly grass, but it still supplemented its diet with leaves and branches.

In contrast, M. trogontherii's ancestor, the warm-climate species M. meridionalis (often called the southern mammoth), had teeth with lower crowns and only 12 to 14 ridges. M. trogontherii's descendant, M. primigenius – the woolly mammoth – had taller crowns than M. trogontherii and up to 26 ridges. Study of mammoth teeth, therefore, suggests that primitive mammoths such as M. meridionalis were woodland animals that mostly ate leaves and branches, but that later species became grassland animals specialised for a grass diet. This pattern is supported by other lines of evidence, such as the environment in which mammoth fossils are found.

Where mammoths lived
M. trogontherii fossils have been found in Germany, Spain, England and Siberia but, unlike some other mammoth species, they never colonised North America. Animal and plant fossils found in the same places as M. trogontherii indicate that it was tolerant of cool conditions and it may therefore have been the first mammoth species to grow a hairy coat. In common with living elephants, the more primitive mammoths (like M. meridionalis) lived in warm places and so were probably naked-skinned.

Top of page

Graphical version

[ Text Only: Homepage ]
[ Graphical: Channel4 Homepage ]
[ Contact Us ]
[ Access Advice ]

[ HTML 4.01 TR Approved ]