What is the first image comes to your mind when thinking about the Ice Age? According to my, the answer is Mammoths. Woolly Mammoths are the ancient ancestors of modern elephants. They were disappeared from the world during the time period of the last ice age due to several reasons. One major reason is losing their food. With the weather became warmer their food supply may be changed and they lost their foods supplies. Another main reason was hunting them down. Can you imagine how they looked like when they exist? In this article, I bring you some interesting factors about those creatures to aid you in getting the idea about how they would look in reality!
# Ears or the Woolly Mammoths were shorter than modern elephants.
As they lived in the Ice Age they had some adaptations to survive from cold. As much as their thick fur coat, their shortened ears helped them to survive in cold. They could keep those shortened ears closer to the head and kept them warm.
# Woolly Mammoth was the hardly mammoth in size
According to scientists size of a woolly mammoth was almost the same as a modern African elephant. Usually, a male woolly mammoth weighed about 6 tons. And also usually its height was around 8 to 11 feet. Do you know which was the largest mammoth ever lived? It was the Steppe Mammoth which grew from 13 to 15 feet in height.
# Age of a Woolly Mammoth can be measured from its tusks
Scientists say that rings in mammoth tusk help to identify lots of valuable information about that individual. According to the rings in the tusks are similar to the rings on a tree trunk. But tusk rings are more detailed than rings in tree trunks. Scientists refer to major lines in the tusk as years and other lines as each one for a week. They also find the season in which a Woolly Mammoth died by referring dark increments in tusks to summers. Not only that, but scientists also tell about the health of the mammoth with the thickness of the tusk. As they say, tusks have grown thick when the mammoth was healthy.
# Cave paintings show the relationship between Woolly Mammoths and human
Scientists have found 158 cave paintings related to humans and Woolly Mammoth in Rouffignac cave in France. They represent the important relationship ice age humans had with these giant Woolly Mammoths. Besides, that scientists have found evidence to prove that ice age people have used bones and tusks for various needs. Furniture, Shelters, and tools are some of those needs.
# In 1799 first fully documented Mammoth skeleton was found
Those pieces were brought to the Zoological Museum of the Russian Academy of Science in 1806. Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesuis is the person who reconstructed those pieces together based on a skeleton of an Indian elephant. But he did one mistake. He put tusks in the wrong sockets. So instead of curving inside, tusks were curved outside!
