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Description
Mammuthus primigenius
Extinct animals have captured the imagination of people across the globe. Icons such as the Saber-Toothed Cat, Dodo, Tyrannosaurus rex, Velociraptor, Brontosaurus are known by people the world over. However, arguably, one animal stands out among all others, the Woolly Mammoth.
A close cousin of modern-day elephants, an icon of the ice age with its titular woolly coat and known from countless specimens found frozen in the permafrost of Siberia, Eastern Europe, and Alaska, no other animal captures the imagination of people more than the woolly mammoth.
Throughout even recorded history, prehistoric elephants were known from countless fragments of bones, and some like dwarf elephants and mammoths were depicted as remains of mythical creatures, giants, or trolls. The woolly mammoth however, was described officially described and recognized as elephants by Hans Sloane. In 1728 he was sent the remains of elephant teeth (molars in this case, not tusks as they were called around the time) which were preserved almost perfectly. He likened them to Elephant molars, however, it had more distinctive ridges compared to modern elephants. Sloane, however, was puzzled. How could elephants exist in one of the coldest and most barren places on earth? He theorized that prior to the Noaharkian Flood Fable, it was a tropical paradise teeming with elephants. Contemporary naturalists like Johann Philipp Breyne came up with a similar notion a decade later when and that elephant remains were sent there via flood waters.
It wouldn’t be until 1796 when Georges Cuvier identified these creatures as they are now known to be. Instead of his predecessor thinking these animals were the remains of modern elephants, he theorized this elephant was the remains of a now extinct species, a view which was not widely accepted. In 1799, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, gave the animal a binomial name, calling them “elephas primigenius”, literally meaning “First Elephant” in Latin.
In 1828, British naturalist Joshua Brookes described more remains from his personal collection and coined the genus term “Mammuthus” for a newly described species, “Mammuthus borealis”, and coined the new Genus name. And the name stuck. It was thus, the name Mammuthus primigenius, the "First Mammoth" was coined.
The term “Mammoth” has a vague origin. Some people think it originated via the Old Vogul word meaning earth horn. Furthermore, it could also be derived from “mehemot” The Arabic spelling of the biblical word Behemoth. These are just one or a few possible origins of the word “mammoth”. One thing is certain, American President Thomas Jefferson who had a great interest in paleontology (having found fossils of animals like the Mastodon and Megalonyx in America) was responsible getting the word “mammoth” to be associated with anything large or great.
The woolly mammoth itself was around the size of some African Bush elephants and had the same proboscidean body plan/sexual dimorphism. Females (cows) were smaller than males (bulls) with the avg. cow weighing in at around 4-4.8 tons, with males being upwards of 5.7-6.6 tons. As seen in cave paintings and some frozen specimens, on its upper back was a fat-filled hump, an energy resource for times when food was thin on the ground. However, juveniles had backs that were like modern-day Asian Elephants, thus they would not have gained this humped back until they were further into adolescence. What’s seen in almost every painting in caves as well as all frozen specimens is a singular domed head. The trunk, while similar to some elephants had a distinctive two-pronged end. Something seen in cave paintings, but it wouldn’t be until 1924 where this was confirmed in life through a frozen specimen. The lower “finger” would have been effective in gripping grass on the ground and bringing it to its maw.
The tusks were massive compared to modern elephants. Cows had tusks between 3.9-5.9ft long on avg. being as long as a person. Bulls had far bigger tusks, 7.4-9.5ft long, with the largest being 14.2ft long from a massive bull mammoth. They were likely used for combat between rival males as well as to dig for vegetation under the ice age snow.
The woolly mammoth’s famous coat is a trademark feature that is shown in every restoration and obviously backed up through frozen specimens found in ice and the permafrost. The coat consisted of long course guard hair or around a foot-long on the upper part of the body and over 2 feet long on the central and lower parts of the body. Even though almost every depiction shows the mammoth as having brown fur, and on preserved specimens it was brownish red, it was actually quite varied. DNA testing done on the hair in 2006, showed it could have had hair colors ranging from chestnut-brown, dark brown, even red and various shades of blonde.
In terms of frozen specimens themselves, dozens of specimens have been recovered. In Yakutsk in 1806 Michael Friedrich Adams described a frozen mammoth in the permafrost from Yakutsk. This specimen, consisted of a complete skeleton, excluding the tusks (one of the first ever discovered), skin from the legs, parts of the torso, and over 40lbs of hair from parts of the body.
In 1948, the first (and so far, only) woolly mammoth was discovered in America. Nicknamed Effie, it was an adult consisting of a virtually complete head, trunk, foreleg, and fur samples, along with a nearly skeleton.
Among the most famous were the discovery of a calf, Dima, discovered in 1977 it was among the best-preserved woolly mammoth specimens. Found on a tributary of the Kolyma River. Probably most famous and among the most recently discovered were two other calves, Lyuba discovered in 2007, and Yuka discovered in 2012. The former being unique in that it had preserved stomach content allowing paleontologists to study what it was feeding on. And, they found evidence of her mother’s milk, possibly consumed hours before her death. Understandable since she was only a few months old at the time.
The coat wasn’t the only adaptation the woolly mammoth it had to combat the cold. It also had far smaller ears compared to modern elephants, especially the African elephant. Modern African elephants use their ears to cool themselves down, with many blood vessels are present in the ears, and they also move them around to create air currents to cool them off. Woolly mammoths on the other hand had smaller ears likely because they are the areas that would have been susceptible to frostbite. The same is true for the tail of the Mammoth. It was far shorter than modern elephants, however, on some frozen specimens, the hairs were longer on the tail which basically compensated for its short length, allowing them to use the hairs as flyswatters like modern elephants. Finally, all specimens had a layer of fat to combat the cold up to 3in thick. All of these features allowed mammoths to survive in climates as cold as -70F in some areas.
Behavior-wise, woolly mammoths were very similar to modern elephants. Primarily with females and their young, an old Matriarch 40-60 years old leading her herd consisting of her young and their own babies living together. This is supported by fossil sites with multiple skeletons found together, cave paintings showing large herds, and trackways of migrating mammoths showing multiple mammoths moving in the same direction. It is unknown how large these herds could have been. As at a lot of mammoth fossil sites, there are groups dated to different times, but given that elephants can form massive herds consisting of different families, it’s highly likely that dozens if not hundreds of mammoths could have formed herds together. Males likely lived alone, or they formed bachelor groups looking for female herds to mate with.
Their diet, like modern elephants was herbivory, with a focus on grass for the most part and the occasional grab at a tree’s branches here and there. The ridges on the teeth allowed the mammoths to better handle the tougher silica in grass, as well as the fact it allowed for more even wear in how they processed food.
Mammoths themselves are a distinctive group of elephants, evolving in Africa around 6,000,000 years ago during the early Pliocene, and subsequently migrated out of Africa, spreading to Eurasia during the late Pliocene. They are the most derived of all proboscideans with their closest cousins being the Asian Elephant (Elephas maximus).
The woolly mammoth itself is believed to have arisen quite recently, around 400,000 years ago in Eurasia during the mid-Pleistocene. The last ice age around 100,000 years ago was when these animals reached their apex, as their primary habitat, the open steppe grasslands became widespread from Portugal to British Columbia.
Habitat-wise, it primarily lived in the Northern Hemisphere, but it was found all over the place. From as far west as Portugal, as far east as British Columbia, as far north as Murmansk and as far south as Northern China, Indiana, and Italy. They were so widespread; they inhabited an ecosystem known as Mammoth Steppe. While like some steppe found in areas of Russia, it was far more diverse in terms of flora with some scattered trees such as larches here and there, and contrary to popular belief, very little snow in some parts since there were pockets of high pressure in the region (though snow was present in other parts across Eurasia and America). They lived alongside an ecosystem reminiscent of Africa’s fauna. Woolly rhinos, a variety of horses, Irish elk, musk ox, and saiga just to name a few species. Predators would have included bears, wolves, steppe lions, and in some cases, saber-toothed cats such as Smilodon in the new world exclusively, and Homotherium in both the old and new world.
The extinction of this magnificent Mammoth is largely believed to have been a combination of overhunting and climate change. DNA evidence shows a major crash in the Mammoths Population around 12,000 years ago. This was when humans had largely colonized the most of the mammoth’s habitat and overhunting probably finished most of this animal off. Many mammoth skeletons show evidence of human butchery as well as countless artifacts recovered from Paleo-Indian dig sites be it just pieces of jewelry, scrimshaw for personal use for various Indians, Tusks used for supports for huts, and perhaps most grim, spear throwers used to hunt megafauna, including the mammoths.
Dates of around 8-9,000 years ago are largely believed to have been when the last woolly mammoths went extinct on the mainland of Eurasia and North America. Recent, 2021, genome studies push the date down even further to around 4,000 years ago in Mainland Siberia. However, islands were truly the last stronghold of Mammoths, both in a variety of islands off the coast of Northern Siberia and St.Paul’s Island off Alaska. With no way to colonize the islands, divided by open water and cold environments, these were the last bastions of these magnificent proboscideans. Mammoths on St.Paul survived until roughly 5,000 years ago, the more famous population on Wrangel Island whose population survived until around 3,750 years ago, well into the holocene. In other words, Woolly Mammoths were around while the Great Pyramids of Giza were still standing. The population was small no more than 1,000 mammoths on the island, and studies indicate that they went out quickly and there was no gradual decline. Furthermore, the Mammoths were smaller compared to mainland relatives, likely due to loss of habitat diversity and fewer food sources.
While the animal may be gone, there may be hope that sometime in this century we could see a cloned mammoth. In 2015, the woolly mammoth genome was completed, spurring on hope for this endeavor to bring it back. However, in order for this enterprise to take off, researchers would need living cells of a mammoth. Today, the only extinct animal we have any functioning DNA that could possibly be used for cloning is the Thylacine, researchers were able to get it from one preserved in a museum’s collection and are now attempting to repair it. Allegedly in March 2019 a Japanese-Russian team claimed that they have viable DNA from a mammoth and are now replicating the gene sequence through mice, as elephants are far too large, complex, and above all endangered to be utilized.
Another, more feasible possibility is via gene editing. Mammoths and Asian Elephants are extremely close cousins, and Harvard geneticist George Church advocated for editing Asian elephant DNA and grow it in an artificial womb. The edits include splicing genes for it to have longer tusks, a shaggy coat, growth of subcutaneous fat, smaller ear size, and subtle tweaks to how the skeleton to allow it to grow similar to a mammoth. Make no mistake, this won’t be a pure woolly mammoth, but if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, isn’t it a duck?
For now, this is just talk, but there is a high probability that we could see a Woolly Mammoth or at least an organism like a Woolly Mammoth in the following decades.
Others have criticized this view. Considering we are unable to protect even modern elephants from poaching and habitat, why devote elephants to reviving a long-lost cousin for just pure entertainment? After all, even if we bring one back, it’s not going to be a true woolly mammoth, it will just be a copy, a lookalike of one, and not the real thing.
Whatever one’s view on the ethics or prospects of bringing a woolly mammoth back, one cannot deny that the world has been captivated by this icon. A shaggy titan of the ice age steppe, that not only captured the imagination of us, but also our ancestors, and unfortunately, our ancestors were likely the reason why this awesome creature is no longer with us.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Happy first day of winter y’all! Thought I’d show this beauty since it lived in a place that had to face winter weather constantly. Now originally, I had planned to include a lot more on human interactions with the mammoth, but I realized that I should probably just focus on the woolly mammoth itself and not humans.

Arguably one of the biggest profiles I ever wrote, and it has to be, it's THE MOST ICONIC of all extinct animals.
The poses were largely inspired by shots of elephants and the bull mammoth in the foreground was inspired by a shot that I took when I was in Berlin.
Will this be in PMP? YES, it will. I decided to target both Doggerland and Yakutia for the rescue locations for episode 5. As for now, it’s barely in pre-production.
Model and Skin by Demonhunter:
European Woolly Mammoth (Demon Hunter) | ZT2 Download Library Wiki | Fandom

For Past Meets Present:
Past Meets Present (Pt4 is Up) - Page 2 - The ZT2 Round Table

Description
Mammuthus primigenius
Extinct animals have captured the imagination of people across the globe. Icons such as the Saber-Toothed Cat, Dodo, Tyrannosaurus rex, Velociraptor, Brontosaurus are known by people the world over. However, arguably, one animal stands out among all others, the Woolly Mammoth.
A close cousin of modern-day elephants, an icon of the ice age with its titular woolly coat and known from countless specimens found frozen in the permafrost of Siberia, Eastern Europe, and Alaska, no other animal captures the imagination of people more than the woolly mammoth.
Throughout even recorded history, prehistoric elephants were known from countless fragments of bones, and some like dwarf elephants and mammoths were depicted as remains of mythical creatures, giants, or trolls. The woolly mammoth however, was described officially described and recognized as elephants by Hans Sloane. In 1728 he was sent the remains of elephant teeth (molars in this case, not tusks as they were called around the time) which were preserved almost perfectly. He likened them to Elephant molars, however, it had more distinctive ridges compared to modern elephants. Sloane, however, was puzzled. How could elephants exist in one of the coldest and most barren places on earth? He theorized that prior to the Noaharkian Flood Fable, it was a tropical paradise teeming with elephants. Contemporary naturalists like Johann Philipp Breyne came up with a similar notion a decade later when and that elephant remains were sent there via flood waters.
It wouldn’t be until 1796 when Georges Cuvier identified these creatures as they are now known to be. Instead of his predecessor thinking these animals were the remains of modern elephants, he theorized this elephant was the remains of a now extinct species, a view which was not widely accepted. In 1799, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, gave the animal a binomial name, calling them “elephas primigenius”, literally meaning “First Elephant” in Latin.
In 1828, British naturalist Joshua Brookes described more remains from his personal collection and coined the genus term “Mammuthus” for a newly described species, “Mammuthus borealis”, and coined the new Genus name. And the name stuck. It was thus, the name Mammuthus primigenius, the "First Mammoth" was coined.
The term “Mammoth” has a vague origin. Some people think it originated via the Old Vogul word meaning earth horn. Furthermore, it could also be derived from “mehemot” The Arabic spelling of the biblical word Behemoth. These are just one or a few possible origins of the word “mammoth”. One thing is certain, American President Thomas Jefferson who had a great interest in paleontology (having found fossils of animals like the Mastodon and Megalonyx in America) was responsible getting the word “mammoth” to be associated with anything large or great.
The woolly mammoth itself was around the size of some African Bush elephants and had the same proboscidean body plan/sexual dimorphism. Females (cows) were smaller than males (bulls) with the avg. cow weighing in at around 4-4.8 tons, with males being upwards of 5.7-6.6 tons. As seen in cave paintings and some frozen specimens, on its upper back was a fat-filled hump, an energy resource for times when food was thin on the ground. However, juveniles had backs that were like modern-day Asian Elephants, thus they would not have gained this humped back until they were further into adolescence. What’s seen in almost every painting in caves as well as all frozen specimens is a singular domed head. The trunk, while similar to some elephants had a distinctive two-pronged end. Something seen in cave paintings, but it wouldn’t be until 1924 where this was confirmed in life through a frozen specimen. The lower “finger” would have been effective in gripping grass on the ground and bringing it to its maw.
The tusks were massive compared to modern elephants. Cows had tusks between 3.9-5.9ft long on avg. being as long as a person. Bulls had far bigger tusks, 7.4-9.5ft long, with the largest being 14.2ft long from a massive bull mammoth. They were likely used for combat between rival males as well as to dig for vegetation under the ice age snow.
The woolly mammoth’s famous coat is a trademark feature that is shown in every restoration and obviously backed up through frozen specimens found in ice and the permafrost. The coat consisted of long course guard hair or around a foot-long on the upper part of the body and over 2 feet long on the central and lower parts of the body. Even though almost every depiction shows the mammoth as having brown fur, and on preserved specimens it was brownish red, it was actually quite varied. DNA testing done on the hair in 2006, showed it could have had hair colors ranging from chestnut-brown, dark brown, even red and various shades of blonde.
In terms of frozen specimens themselves, dozens of specimens have been recovered. In Yakutsk in 1806 Michael Friedrich Adams described a frozen mammoth in the permafrost from Yakutsk. This specimen, consisted of a complete skeleton, excluding the tusks (one of the first ever discovered), skin from the legs, parts of the torso, and over 40lbs of hair from parts of the body.
In 1948, the first (and so far, only) woolly mammoth was discovered in America. Nicknamed Effie, it was an adult consisting of a virtually complete head, trunk, foreleg, and fur samples, along with a nearly skeleton.
Among the most famous were the discovery of a calf, Dima, discovered in 1977 it was among the best-preserved woolly mammoth specimens. Found on a tributary of the Kolyma River. Probably most famous and among the most recently discovered were two other calves, Lyuba discovered in 2007, and Yuka discovered in 2012. The former being unique in that it had preserved stomach content allowing paleontologists to study what it was feeding on. And, they found evidence of her mother’s milk, possibly consumed hours before her death. Understandable since she was only a few months old at the time.
The coat wasn’t the only adaptation the woolly mammoth it had to combat the cold. It also had far smaller ears compared to modern elephants, especially the African elephant. Modern African elephants use their ears to cool themselves down, with many blood vessels are present in the ears, and they also move them around to create air currents to cool them off. Woolly mammoths on the other hand had smaller ears likely because they are the areas that would have been susceptible to frostbite. The same is true for the tail of the Mammoth. It was far shorter than modern elephants, however, on some frozen specimens, the hairs were longer on the tail which basically compensated for its short length, allowing them to use the hairs as flyswatters like modern elephants. Finally, all specimens had a layer of fat to combat the cold up to 3in thick. All of these features allowed mammoths to survive in climates as cold as -70F in some areas.
Behavior-wise, woolly mammoths were very similar to modern elephants. Primarily with females and their young, an old Matriarch 40-60 years old leading her herd consisting of her young and their own babies living together. This is supported by fossil sites with multiple skeletons found together, cave paintings showing large herds, and trackways of migrating mammoths showing multiple mammoths moving in the same direction. It is unknown how large these herds could have been. As at a lot of mammoth fossil sites, there are groups dated to different times, but given that elephants can form massive herds consisting of different families, it’s highly likely that dozens if not hundreds of mammoths could have formed herds together. Males likely lived alone, or they formed bachelor groups looking for female herds to mate with.
Their diet, like modern elephants was herbivory, with a focus on grass for the most part and the occasional grab at a tree’s branches here and there. The ridges on the teeth allowed the mammoths to better handle the tougher silica in grass, as well as the fact it allowed for more even wear in how they processed food.
Mammoths themselves are a distinctive group of elephants, evolving in Africa around 6,000,000 years ago during the early Pliocene, and subsequently migrated out of Africa, spreading to Eurasia during the late Pliocene. They are the most derived of all proboscideans with their closest cousins being the Asian Elephant (Elephas maximus).
The woolly mammoth itself is believed to have arisen quite recently, around 400,000 years ago in Eurasia during the mid-Pleistocene. The last ice age around 100,000 years ago was when these animals reached their apex, as their primary habitat, the open steppe grasslands became widespread from Portugal to British Columbia.
Habitat-wise, it primarily lived in the Northern Hemisphere, but it was found all over the place. From as far west as Portugal, as far east as British Columbia, as far north as Murmansk and as far south as Northern China, Indiana, and Italy. They were so widespread; they inhabited an ecosystem known as Mammoth Steppe. While like some steppe found in areas of Russia, it was far more diverse in terms of flora with some scattered trees such as larches here and there, and contrary to popular belief, very little snow in some parts since there were pockets of high pressure in the region (though snow was present in other parts across Eurasia and America). They lived alongside an ecosystem reminiscent of Africa’s fauna. Woolly rhinos, a variety of horses, Irish elk, musk ox, and saiga just to name a few species. Predators would have included bears, wolves, steppe lions, and in some cases, saber-toothed cats such as Smilodon in the new world exclusively, and Homotherium in both the old and new world.
The extinction of this magnificent Mammoth is largely believed to have been a combination of overhunting and climate change. DNA evidence shows a major crash in the Mammoths Population around 12,000 years ago. This was when humans had largely colonized the most of the mammoth’s habitat and overhunting probably finished most of this animal off. Many mammoth skeletons show evidence of human butchery as well as countless artifacts recovered from Paleo-Indian dig sites be it just pieces of jewelry, scrimshaw for personal use for various Indians, Tusks used for supports for huts, and perhaps most grim, spear throwers used to hunt megafauna, including the mammoths.
Dates of around 8-9,000 years ago are largely believed to have been when the last woolly mammoths went extinct on the mainland of Eurasia and North America. Recent, 2021, genome studies push the date down even further to around 4,000 years ago in Mainland Siberia. However, islands were truly the last stronghold of Mammoths, both in a variety of islands off the coast of Northern Siberia and St.Paul’s Island off Alaska. With no way to colonize the islands, divided by open water and cold environments, these were the last bastions of these magnificent proboscideans. Mammoths on St.Paul survived until roughly 5,000 years ago, the more famous population on Wrangel Island whose population survived until around 3,750 years ago, well into the holocene. In other words, Woolly Mammoths were around while the Great Pyramids of Giza were still standing. The population was small no more than 1,000 mammoths on the island, and studies indicate that they went out quickly and there was no gradual decline. Furthermore, the Mammoths were smaller compared to mainland relatives, likely due to loss of habitat diversity and fewer food sources.
While the animal may be gone, there may be hope that sometime in this century we could see a cloned mammoth. In 2015, the woolly mammoth genome was completed, spurring on hope for this endeavor to bring it back. However, in order for this enterprise to take off, researchers would need living cells of a mammoth. Today, the only extinct animal we have any functioning DNA that could possibly be used for cloning is the Thylacine, researchers were able to get it from one preserved in a museum’s collection and are now attempting to repair it. Allegedly in March 2019 a Japanese-Russian team claimed that they have viable DNA from a mammoth and are now replicating the gene sequence through mice, as elephants are far too large, complex, and above all endangered to be utilized.
Another, more feasible possibility is via gene editing. Mammoths and Asian Elephants are extremely close cousins, and Harvard geneticist George Church advocated for editing Asian elephant DNA and grow it in an artificial womb. The edits include splicing genes for it to have longer tusks, a shaggy coat, growth of subcutaneous fat, smaller ear size, and subtle tweaks to how the skeleton to allow it to grow similar to a mammoth. Make no mistake, this won’t be a pure woolly mammoth, but if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, isn’t it a duck?
For now, this is just talk, but there is a high probability that we could see a Woolly Mammoth or at least an organism like a Woolly Mammoth in the following decades.
Others have criticized this view. Considering we are unable to protect even modern elephants from poaching and habitat, why devote elephants to reviving a long-lost cousin for just pure entertainment? After all, even if we bring one back, it’s not going to be a true woolly mammoth, it will just be a copy, a lookalike of one, and not the real thing.
Whatever one’s view on the ethics or prospects of bringing a woolly mammoth back, one cannot deny that the world has been captivated by this icon. A shaggy titan of the ice age steppe, that not only captured the imagination of us, but also our ancestors, and unfortunately, our ancestors were likely the reason why this awesome creature is no longer with us.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Happy first day of winter y’all! Thought I’d show this beauty since it lived in a place that had to face winter weather constantly. Now originally, I had planned to include a lot more on human interactions with the mammoth, but I realized that I should probably just focus on the woolly mammoth itself and not humans.

Arguably one of the biggest profiles I ever wrote, and it has to be, it's THE MOST ICONIC of all extinct animals.
The poses were largely inspired by shots of elephants and the bull mammoth in the foreground was inspired by a shot that I took when I was in Berlin.
Will this be in PMP? YES, it will. I decided to target both Doggerland and Yakutia for the rescue locations for episode 5. As for now, it’s barely in pre-production.
Model and Skin by Demonhunter:
European Woolly Mammoth (Demon Hunter) | ZT2 Download Library Wiki | Fandom

For Past Meets Present:
Past Meets Present (Pt4 is Up) - Page 2 - The ZT2 Round Table