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Members of Japan customs inspect a 39,000-year-old female baby woolly mammoth named Yuka from the Siberian permafrost upon its arrival at an exhibition in Yokohama, suburban Tokyo on July 9, 2013. One of the world’s last surviving groups of woolly mammoths likely died of thirst as the salty seas rose around these iconic Ice Age creatures 5,600 years ago, researchers say. The study also warns that a similar scenario could imperil island people and animals in the coming years as the climate warms and sea level rises, making fresh water harder to access. To find out what happened to the woolly mammoths, researchers collected a sediment core from one of the few freshwater lake beds on St. Paul Island, a remote area of Alaska that was once part of the Bering Land Bridge that joined the Americas to Asia. By analyzing the core for signs of fungi that grow on animal dung and using radiocarbon dating, they were able to tell when mammoths disappeared. The sediment DNA “showed the presence of mammoth DNA until 5,650 years ago, plus or minus 80 years”, said the study, which described the finding as the most precise dating yet of a major extinction event. (Photo by Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP Photo)
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