Swimming Mammoth corpses found in California Swimming mammoths are not uncommon, nor are strange specie these days. We all know that these are the actual mammoth descendents and are known to swim for food. Recently, a fossil tusk had been recovered from the sea that proves that mammoths swam to the Southern Californian Islands long before. The latest found fossil wasn’t the only discovery that proved the climate change’s wrath on the pygmy mammoths. According to Daniel Muhs, a US geologist in Denver has been working on this matter since 2010 now. He says that the pint-sized animals disappeared from the islands around 12,000 years ago. He further explains the mammoth’s demise being connected to either the Earth’s warming climate, or the arrival of the humans. However, pygmy mammoths had survived a worse climate swing that came about 125,000 years ago. They had then lived in a climate that was warmer than today. Daniel Muhs and his collaborators have discovered an 80,000 year old tusk of a pygmy mammoth that was buried half inside the ground on the northwestern coast of the Santa Rosa islands on the edge of the sea stack. Scientists said that they had reached the four northern channels when the sea level had dropped in the early ice age. At the peak, the giant ice sheets on earth had socked most of the ocean water showing the mechanism of sponges. In the past 150,000 years, the ice sheets had expanded twice, which led the islands to combine together to form larger islands. Santarosae were one of these islands; which later became Santa Rosa. The distance from the coast of southern California to the mainland near Oxnard shrank to 4.5 miles. This distance is easily swimmable by a 10 ton Columbian mammoth. The tusks were found at a distance of 26 miles from the shore. The modern elephants that share a common ancestor with the mammoths can now cover almost 30 miles in the sea with an unusual underwater crawl. There are reports that the elephants which swim to distant islands are actually driven by the smell of the fresh ripe fruit. The tusks found recently by Muhs was found in a very different rock layer in landslide and sandy deposits. The snail shells found with the tusks and the marine layer below the sand suggest that the mammoth dates back to somewhere around 46,000 to 100,000 years ago. The pygmy mammoths have been a species of interest to many scientists and we keep discovering new things about them these days.
Related Article: http://www.researchomatic.com/New-Research/The-Wooly-Mammoth-269464.html