Mystery “mammoth” bones from Alaska were actually ancient whales
4 Articles
4 Articles
For 70 years, two large fossil bones sat in a University of Alaska museum drawer labeled as woolly mammoth — until radiocarbon dating, isotope analysis, and DNA testing revealed they came from two whales of two different species that somehow ended up 250
In 1951, gold miners at Dome Creek, a small settlement north of Fairbanks, donated a pile of fossil bones from their excavations to the explorer and naturalist Otto Geist, who in turn delivered them to the University of Alaska Museum of the North on 7 July of that year. Based on their general shape and where they had been found, two large bone discs from the pile were catalogued as the vertebral growth plates of woolly mammoths and given the spe…
Fossilized bones that seemed to come from woolly mammoths turned out to belong, in fact, to a completely different and unexpected animal, wrote Science Alert.The archaeologist Otto Geist discovered these bones in...
Some woolly mammoth vertebrae discovered in Alaska were kept in museums for 70 years, but a new study has revealed that the findings may actually belong to completely different animals, reports Science Alert. Archaeologist Otto Geist discovered the bones during a 1951 expedition in the prehistoric geographic region of Alaska known as Beringia. Based on the appearance and location of the bones, Geist concluded that the bones likely belonged to wo…
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