Scientists have analysed the chemistry locked inside the tusk of a woolly mammoth to work out how far it traveled in a lifetime. The research shows that the Ice Age animal traveled a distance equivalent to circling the Earth twice.
Woolly mammoths were the hairy cousins of today's elephants, roaming northern latitudes during a prehistoric cold period known as the Pleistocene. The work sheds light on how incredibly mobile these ancient creatures were.
Mammoth tusks were a bit like tree rings, insomuch that they recorded information about the animal's life history.
Furthermore, some chemical elements incorporated into the tusks while the animal was alive can serve as pins on a map, broadly showing where the animal went.
By combining these two things, researchers worked out the travel history of a male mammoth that lived 17,000 years ago in Alaska. Its remains were found near the northern state's Brooks Range of mountains. They found that the mammoth had covered 70,000km of Alaskan landscape during its 28 years on the planet. For comparison, the circumference of the Earth is 40,000km.
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