http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/11/mammoth-find-herders-climate-change
15 years ago, a reindeer herder called Vasily Ivanovich who lived in Russia's remote Yamal peninsula (a wide and wild place in the frozen tundra of north-west Siberia), found a mammoth tusk. After that great discovering, several other mammoth remains have been found in that area, becoming that isolated place in a special area for scientists interested in the evolution and extintion of the woolly mammoths. In May 2007 another reindeer herder found the corpse of a perfectly preserved female baby woolly mammoth (which he named Lyuba,to honor his wife).
Today the mistery of the disappearance of mammoths 9700 years ago is still unsolved. The only thing that is clear, is that they dissapeared at the end of the last Ice Age. Some experts pointed the climatic change as the guilty of the mammoth extinction, although others added to that explanation the "human factor" -: "Two reasons. First a changing environment. Second humans." answered Romanenko ( mammoth specialist and senior scientist from the geography department of Moscow State University)when he was asked about the reason that caused the mammoths death.
Sadly, nowadays the lasts remains of the mammoths (and the answers that they carried about their own mysterious extinction) are in dangerous. The mammoths aren't jsut interesting scientific issues, they're also a big business; every year teams of professional collectors (or fosil's thieves) scour the tundra by boat and/or helicopter, looking for mammoths remains to sell. Because of that and climatic change, a lot of remains of this incredible creatures have been lost forever.
I think that's important to protect those remains because they're a way to get insight about the misteries of the last Ice Age. Studing mammoths you could answer a lot of traditional questions about the paleoclimate, the evolution of mammoths (and their phylogenetic relationships), their ecological relationship with humans, etc. Maybe in the closest future with the DNA technologie, we might clone a mammoth (because we're already able to do it), helping us to understand the past of this animal, and also an important part about our natural history.
15 years ago, a reindeer herder called Vasily Ivanovich who lived in Russia's remote Yamal peninsula (a wide and wild place in the frozen tundra of north-west Siberia), found a mammoth tusk. After that great discovering, several other mammoth remains have been found in that area, becoming that isolated place in a special area for scientists interested in the evolution and extintion of the woolly mammoths. In May 2007 another reindeer herder found the corpse of a perfectly preserved female baby woolly mammoth (which he named Lyuba,to honor his wife).
Today the mistery of the disappearance of mammoths 9700 years ago is still unsolved. The only thing that is clear, is that they dissapeared at the end of the last Ice Age. Some experts pointed the climatic change as the guilty of the mammoth extinction, although others added to that explanation the "human factor" -: "Two reasons. First a changing environment. Second humans." answered Romanenko ( mammoth specialist and senior scientist from the geography department of Moscow State University)when he was asked about the reason that caused the mammoths death.
Sadly, nowadays the lasts remains of the mammoths (and the answers that they carried about their own mysterious extinction) are in dangerous. The mammoths aren't jsut interesting scientific issues, they're also a big business; every year teams of professional collectors (or fosil's thieves) scour the tundra by boat and/or helicopter, looking for mammoths remains to sell. Because of that and climatic change, a lot of remains of this incredible creatures have been lost forever.
I think that's important to protect those remains because they're a way to get insight about the misteries of the last Ice Age. Studing mammoths you could answer a lot of traditional questions about the paleoclimate, the evolution of mammoths (and their phylogenetic relationships), their ecological relationship with humans, etc. Maybe in the closest future with the DNA technologie, we might clone a mammoth (because we're already able to do it), helping us to understand the past of this animal, and also an important part about our natural history.
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