Strange mammoth skull raises questions for scientists

Researchers working on the Channel Islands off of the coast of California have found a complete and remarkably small mammoth skull they said could provide clues both to the evolution of the Ice Age pachyderm and human migration into the Americas.

The scientists behind the discovery, made on Santa Rosa Island, said they’re particularly interested in the fossil specimen because it’s not large enough to qualify as a Columbian mammoth and not sufficiently small to be a pygmy mammoth. Pygmy mammoths, which stood 4 to 6 feet tall, roamed the island during the Pleistocene era, according to the National Park Service.

“This (skull discovery) opens the possibility that this mammoth was intermediate in size between the two species,” Monica Bugbee, a member of the Mammoth Site project that made the discovery, told CNN. “It could represent a transitional animal, somewhere on the way to becoming a completely dwarfed pygmy mammoth.”

Dated Sometime Around the Arlington Man

The US Geological Survey dated charcoal remnants beside the skull to 13,000 years ago, which puts the mammoth at approximately the same time and in the same place as Arlington man, considered to be the oldest human remains in North America. The researchers said one of the questions raised by the discovery is if the humans and mammoths ever coexisted on the island. There is documented evidence of this occurring elsewhere in the world.

“There’s a possibility the mammoths died out before humans arrived and it’s possible humans caused their extinction, hunted them to extinction,” said geologist Dan Muhs of the US Geological Survey. “But there’s a third possibility that at the end of the last glacial period, mammoths could have been under stress with limited food resources with sea levels rising at the islands. Then the arrival of humans delivered the final blow.”

The National Park Service said the mammoth skull, a scapula, and a tooth appeared in an eroding stream bank on the island. Muhs also documented a different uncommon find: mammoth footprints.

The team that made the discovery dubbed the mammoth Larry to respect their late distinguished colleague, Larry Agenbroad, an international leader in paleontology.

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Image credit: NPS

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