Flower loss doomed the mammoths
Flower loss doomed the mammoths
Studies of ancient animal poop paint a new picture of why woolly mammoths disappeared.
Scientists have recently discovered that massive mammals like woolly mammoths might have gone extinct due to the loss of flowers called forbs. Scientists used to think that mammoths lived in grassy areas and ate mostly grass, but after testing the preserved stomachs contents of eight large animals including woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos. At the end of the ice age the ice was melting, and the forbs did not do well in the new wet environment. It turns out that these plants accounted for about 2/3 of their food source. So the mammoths could not find enough food and could not survive.
NOS Themes-
Science is based on evidence- Scientists tested the preserved stomach contents of the extinct animals and found mostly forbs.
Conflicts within the scientific community- Many other scientists say that the people who did this study are over simplifying it and that this may not be the reason mammoths went extinct.
Importance of repeatability- The scientists tested eight different animals and found the same results in all of them.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteoops I accidentally deleted that comment.
DeleteThis article does a really good job of showing the importance of consumers to an ecosystem. It is incredible that knocking out just one link of a food chain can cause such a huge species to go extinct.
The loss of the mammoths would also knock out the predators and some of the mammoths' competitors would die because the lack of food. Also, since the mammoths died out less than 5,000 years ago, the stomach samples could be remarkably well preserved and intact.
ReplyDelete