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hide captionWoolly mammoths depended on tiny flowering plants for protein. Did the decline of the flowers cause their extinction?
Per Möller/Johanna Anjar
Woolly mammoths depended on tiny flowering plants for protein. Did the decline of the flowers cause their extinction?
Per Möller/Johanna Anjar
They were some of the largest, hairiest animals ever to walk the Earth, but new research shows a big part of the woolly mammoth's diet was made up of tiny flowers.
The work is based on DNA analysis of frozen arctic soil and mammoth poop. It suggests that these early vegans depended on the flowers as a vital source of protein. And when the flowers disappeared after the last ice age, so too, did the mammoths that ate them.
Fifty thousand years ago, the present-day arctic tundra was a vast grassland through which mammoths, woolly rhinos, reindeer, and even lions roamed.
Most researchers believed that the mammoths and other giants fed mainly on the grass. But Eske Willerslev, the researcher at the University of Copenhagen wanted to check. Willerslev specializes in analyzing ancient DNA, much of which he finds in frozen Arctic soil. "It's the perfect environment for conducting this type of study," he says.
He and his collaborators took hundreds of frozen soil samples from modern-day Alaska and Siberia. The group analyzed the DNA from dead plants frozen in the soil. And they found that the Arctic wasn't just grassland. There was another class of plants growing at the time. Known as "