Woolly Mammoth! - Michaela Molden - 5th Period

Last week James Bristle was digging a trench for a pipeline in his wheat field when he struck something unusual about eight feet down. He dug some more and discovered three feet of fossil bone. Bristle then contacted the Daniel Fisher who worked with the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology. A team of students came out and found out that it was most of the skeleton of a Jefferson woolly mammoth, approximately 13,000 years old. The mammoth, now referred to as the Bristle Mammoth, was a nearly 40 year old male when he died. The paleontologist think that the mammoth was killed by humans for food and buried under a pond to come back to later. Such things as large rocks to hold the body down in the water, and a stone flake probably used for cutting, and the anatomically correct alignment of the bones are good indicators that their theory is true. Bristle donated the fossil to the University for further study. He was glad to help and glad to get back to his crops as well.

We know that woolly mammoths roamed North America for a while, and were a source of food for the Native Americans for a while. Native Americans in the Alaskan areas and northern America traded mammoth ivory, and carved art into it as well. The mammoth greatly influenced the Native American peoples and was used in many different ways. Woolly mammoths went extinct about 11,700 years ago, and to this day we are still finding remnants of their existence.