Now, an international team led by Eske Willerslev, director of the Centre for Geogenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, has come up with a vastly different picture of what the ice age Arctic looked like — and what kind of food was available. By analyzing the DNA of plants preserved in the permafrost during the ice age, the team concluded that the Arctic landscape was not a bleak, grassy prairie at all, but had a lush cover of small, nutritious plants called forbs — "things like poppies and buttercups and anemones, little flowering plants," said Zazula.
Forbs include many plants that humans eat, including dandelion, sunflower, alfalfa, watercress, parsley and carrot. The ice age Arctic was very cold and dry and probably dusty — extremely different from today's swampy tundra, Zazula said.
It was far more like mountaintop environments where small flowering plants thrive today. Zazula and Duane Froese at the University of Alberta helped drill permafrost samples in the Yukon and Alaska, while other scientists collected samples in other parts of the Arctic — over in all.
Museum scientists have reconstructed the diets of extinct mammals in Britain, thanks to a new way of analysing fossilised teeth.
A team examined the teeth of proboscideans, the group of mammals that consists of elephants and their extinct relatives, including mammoths and mastodons. The animals studied lived in Britain during the Pleistocene Epoch, 2. In a new study, published in the Journal of Quaternary Science , the researchers found that many of these prehistoric animals were able to vary their diets to avoid competing for the same food sources.
The researchers looked at fossils from the mastodon, gomphothere, early mammoth, southern mammoth, straight-tusked elephant, steppe mammoth and woolly mammoth. In Britain they lived in a variety of habitats, from open woods to grasslands, and often co-existed. Prof Adrian Lister , a Museum palaeobiologist and co-author of the study, was part of the team that investigated how much of the grasses and shrubs the different herbivores ate.
Fossilised teeth were examined from the Museum collections and from Norwich Castle Museum. It is possible to see how much rough-textured plant material each animal ate by looking at how their molar teeth got worn down. The animals were either grazers eating mostly grass , mixed feeders, or browsers eating mostly shrubs and trees. Grasses cause more abrasion than trees because they contain high levels of fibre.
Juha Saarinen, a Museum PhD student and co-author of the paper, says, 'We used an angle-meter to measure the depth of the worn ridges in the teeth.
The team also used existing pollen data to analyse the plants that would have been growing at each site where the teeth were found. This allowed the researchers to examine how different species of mammoth or elephant could co-exist and get enough to eat. Nov 09, Slave room discovered at Pompeii in 'rare' find Nov 06, Nov 03, Oct 29, Load comments 0. Let us know if there is a problem with our content.
Your message to the editors. Your email only if you want to be contacted back. Send Feedback. Thank you for taking time to provide your feedback to the editors. E-mail the story Eastern European woolly mammoths changed their diet shortly before becoming extinct.
Your friend's email. Your email. I would like to subscribe to Science X Newsletter. Learn more. Your name. Note Your email address is used only to let the recipient know who sent the email. Your message. Clues to fossil mammals' diets come from teeth, skull shape and the positions and strength of major jaw muscles, from fossilized dung and guts, from oxygen isotopes in bone and teeth, and from diets of similar modern animals.
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