rośliny-i-grzyby: Woolly mammoth

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

The woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) is an extinct species of mammoth that lived from the Middle Pleistocene until its extinction in the Holocene epoch. It was one of the last in a line of mammoth species, beginning with the African Mammuthus subplanifrons in the early Pliocene. The woolly mammoth began to diverge from the steppe mammoth about 800,000 years ago in Siberia. Its closest extant relative is the Asian elephant. The Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) lived alongside the woolly mammoth in North America, and DNA studies show that the two hybridised with each other. Mammoth remains were long known in Asia before they became known to Europeans. The origin of these remains wa…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 92

Phylogeography of the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) in the Minusinsk Depression of southern Siberia in the Late Pleistocene.. To date, a number of studies have been published on the phylogenetics of woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), ranging from analyses of parts of the mitochondrial genome to studies of complete nuclear genomes. However, until recently nothing was known about the genetic diversity of woolly mammoths in southern Siberia, in the Minusinsk Depression in particular. Within the framework of this effort, libraries for high-throughput sequencing of seven bone samples of woolly mammoths were obtained, two-round enrichment using biotinylated probes of modern mtDNA o…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 72

The Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) is an extinct species of mammoth that inhabited North America from southern Canada to Costa Rica during the Pleistocene epoch. The Columbian mammoth descended from Eurasian steppe mammoths that colonized North America during the Early Pleistocene around 1.5–1.3 million years ago, and later experienced hybridisation with the woolly mammoth lineage. The Columbian mammoth was among the last mammoth species, and the pygmy mammoths evolved from them on the Channel Islands of California. The closest extant relative of the Columbian and other mammoths is the Asian elephant. Reaching 3.72–4.2 m (12.2–13.8 ft) at the shoulders and 9.2–12.5 t (9.1–12.3 long t…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 72

A mammoth is a member of the extinct elephantid genus Mammuthus. They lived from the late Miocene epoch (from around 6.2 million years ago) into the Holocene until about 4,000 years ago, with mammoth species at various times inhabiting Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. Mammoths are distinguished from living elephants by their (typically large) spirally twisted tusks and in some later species, the development of numerous adaptions to living in cold environments, including a thick layer of fur. Mammoths and Asian elephants are more closely related to each other than they are to African elephants. The oldest mammoth representative, Mammuthus subplanifrons, appeared around 6 million years…

Evidence: 41 • authority: 88

Spatiotemporal patterns of existence and extinction for woolly mammoth in Siberia in the last 50,000 years. Abstract A database of ca. 970 radiocarbon dates on bones, teeth, and tusks of the woolly mammoth ( Mammuthus primigenius Blum.) from Siberia was created in order to understand the spatiotemporal distribution of this species over the last 50,000 14 C years (BP). Mammoths populated all parts of Siberia until ca. 12,000 BP. After that, a few refugia exited south of ca. 60°N at ca. 10,600–12,000 BP, and in the northern part of mainland Siberia mammoths survived until ca. 9700 BP. At ca. 9500–3700 BP, they existed only in today’s insular regions such as the New Siberian Islands and Wrange…

Evidence: 41 • authority: 92

A Million Years of Mammoth Mitogenome Evolution.. The genomic study of specimens dating to the Early and Middle Pleistocene (EP and MP), a period spanning from 2.6 million years ago (Ma) to 126 thousand years ago (ka), has the potential to elucidate the evolutionary processes that shaped present-day biodiversity. Obtaining genomic data from this period is challenging, but mitochondrial DNA, given its higher abundance compared to nuclear DNA, could play an important role to understand evolutionary processes at this time scale. In this study, we report 34 new mitogenomes, including two EP and nine MP mammoth (Mammuthus spp.) specimens from Siberia and North America and analyze them jointly wi…

Evidence: 41 • authority: 72

The mammoth steppe, also known as steppe-tundra, was once the Earth's most extensive biome. During glacial periods in the later Pleistocene, it stretched east to west from the Iberian Peninsula in the west of Europe, then across Eurasia and through Beringia (the region including the far northeast of Siberia, Alaska and the now submerged land between them) and into the Yukon in northwest Canada; from north to south, the steppe reached from the Arctic southward to southern Europe, Central Asia and northern China. The mammoth steppe was cold and dry, and relatively featureless—though climate, topography, and geography varied considerably throughout. Certain areas of the biome, such as coastal…

Evidence: 31 • authority: 80

Body sizes of the woolly mammoth Mammuthus primigenius (Blumenbach) of the second half of the Late Pleistocene in the north of Eastern Siberia

Evidence: 31 • authority: 88

The Origin and Evolution of the Woolly Mammoth. The mammoth lineage provides an example of rapid adaptive evolution in response to the changing environments of the Pleistocene. Using well-dated samples from across the mammoth's Eurasian range, we document geographical and chronological variation in adaptive morphology. This work illustrates an incremental (if mosaic) evolutionary sequence but also reveals a complex interplay of local morphological innovation, migration, and extirpation in the origin and evolution of a mammalian species. In particular, northeastern Siberia is identified as an area of successive allopatric innovations that apparently spread to Europe, where they contributed t…

Evidence: 31 • authority: 92

Ground squirrel coprolites preserve complex archives of ancient environmental DNA over 700,000 years.. Permafrost-preserved ground squirrel (Urocitellus) burrows in Yukon, Canada contain coprolites (palaeofaeces) that span from the Holocene to at least the Middle Pleistocene (~700 kya). Using shotgun metagenomics and targeted enrichment, we recover a rich, multi-taxon spectrum of ancient environmental DNA from these pellets, including: plants, insects, microbes, and megafauna consistent with eastern Beringian ecosystems. These coprolites consistently preserve an abundance of eukaryotic DNA, enabling the assembly of >18 mitochondrial genomes (ground squirrel, snowshoe hare, steppe bison, hor…