“It’s a real boom industry,” Wooller says.Īs he later points out in an email, his name bears a striking resemblance to the subject of his latest research. In recent years scientists have used isotopes to reconstruct ancient human diets, solve cold case murders, and identify drug smuggling routes. Isotopes are atoms of an element that, because of missing or extra neutrons, have atomic weights slightly different from one another. I met Wooller in the summer of 2018, at the university office where he leads the Alaska Isotopic Research Laboratory. “Just reading the paper, I felt like Jane Goodall observing these animals.” Carving into a mammoth tusk The researchers came as close as possible to reconstructing a mammoth’s life, short of “going back in time and putting a GPS collar on a woolly mammoth,” says Vanderbilt University paleontologist Larisa DeSantis, who wasn’t involved in the study. ( Find out how scientists think they could resurrect a woolly mammoth.) The work may also inform studies about why these iconic animals ultimately went extinct and about how today’s big mammals might react to a steadily warming world. The research, published today in Science, relied on cutting-edge tools and techniques to provide clues about how woolly mammoths lived, including their possible interactions with humans. They also retraced its footsteps across Ice Age Alaska over 28 years, marking the first time scientists have been able to reconstruct a mammoth’s life history in such fine detail. Examining the tusk of a woolly mammoth that lived about 17,000 years ago, they uncovered details about its activities from birth to death. In a new study Wooller led a group of researchers doing just that. What’s tricky is accessing a tusk’s chemical composition and interpreting it.
Everything between is the mammoth’s lifetime.” The tusk is a record of its owner’s travels, diet, and even its death. “The base of the tusk is the old mammoth. “The tip of the tusk is the young mammoth,” says Matthew Wooller, an ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It sprouts from beneath the mammoth’s gums, cells dividing continually, even daily. A woolly mammoth’s tusk is a story written in ivory.
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