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The Bering land bridge was exposed at various times over an almost three million year period, when wide scale glaciation lowered sea levels by as much as 150 metres. The land bridge was part of "Beringia," which refers to the stretch of land between present day Siberia and Yukon Territory. It's been home to woolly mammoths, steppe bison and humans. Jeff Bond, a geologist with Yukon Geological Survey in Whitehorse, has produced a map showing what Beringia looked like 18,000 years ago. At that time, much of the earth was glaciated, but Beringia remained predominantly ice-free due to its arid...

...and it was worn by a man! The suspicion is that the tiara - or diadem - was made by Denisovans who are already known to have had the technology 50,000 or so years ago to make elegant needles out of ivory and a sophisticated and beautiful stone bracelet. The tiara maybe the oldest of its type in the world. It appears to have had a practical use: to keep hair out of the eyes; it's size indicates it was for male, not female, use. Another theory, although related to tiaras made 20,000 years later by people living around river...

The last breaths of mammoths and mastodons some 13,000 years ago have garnered plenty of research and just as much debate. What killed these large beasts in a relative instant of geologic time? A question asked less often: What happened when they disappeared? A new study, based partly on dung fungus, provides some answers to both questions. The upshot: The landscape changed dramatically. "As soon as herbivores drop off the landscape, we see different plant communities," said lead researcher Jacquelyn Gill of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, adding the result was an "ecosystem upheaval." Gill and her colleagues found that...

Full title: JURASSIC LARK Woolly Mammoths will roam new Jurassic Park-style theme park with cave lions and extinct horses in TEN YEARS, Russian scientists sayThe beasts are set to make a comeback to the plains of Siberia some 14,000 years after going extinct. LONG extinct cave lions may be about to rise from their icy graves and prowl once more alongside woolly mammoths and ancient horses in a real life Jurassic Park. In less than 10 years it is hoped the fearsome big cats will be released from an underground lab as part of a remarkable plan to populate a...

The tip of a bone point fragment found embedded in a mastodon rib from an archaeological site in Washington state shows that hunters were present in North America at least 800 years before Clovis, confirming that the first inhabitants arrived earlier to North America than previously thought, says a team of researchers led by a Texas A&M University archaeologist. Michael Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans in the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M, and colleagues from Colorado, Washington and Denmark believe the find at the Manis site in Washington demonstrates that humans were...

Archaeologists in Austria have uncovered a gruesome ‘kill site’ where Stone Age people slaughtered mammoths. The site, which was found during construction of a new bypass in Drasenhofen on the Czech border, contains mammoth tusks and bones. The remains have been dated to between 18,000 and 28,000 years ago. “This Paleolithic 'kill site' is the first one in Austria that has been excavated and analyzed according to the latest methods,” said Martin Krenn of Austria’s Federal Monuments Office, in a statement. “It gives us a sensational view of the way of life of the Palaeolithic people.”  An early Bronze Age settlement...

Scientists are analyzing the perfectly preserved remains of a prehistoric horse in a bid to clone the now-extinct animal. Recently discovered in permafrost in the Siberian region of Yakutia, the skin, hair, hooves and tail of the carcass are all preserved. The remains are estimated to be 30,000 to 40,000 years old. Experts believe that the foal was about 2 months old when it died. Semyon Grigoryev, head of the Mammoth Museum in the regional capital of Yakutsk, was surprised to see the perfect state of the find. He noted it's the best-preserved ancient foal found to date. The Siberian...

The frozen carcass of the dark-brown baby horse is from an extinct species is up to 40,000 years old, and the animal was perfectly preserved in the Siberian permafrost in the Batagai crater in Yakutia, the coldest region in Russia. Leading researcher of the laboratory of Mammoth Museum Dr Semyon Grigoriev said: 'Fortunately, the animal's muscle tissues were undamaged and well preserved, so we managed to get samples of this unique find for biotechnology research.' South Korean cloning expert Professor Hwang Woo Suk, currently in Yakutsk, told The Siberian Times that a joint bid is underway to find a living...

Extinct woolly mammoths, cave lions and other long-gone species may be brought back to lifee in a new £4.5million cloning facility in Russia, scientists claim. The new Jurassic Park-style centre will be a "world class paleo-genetic scientific hub" in the world's coldest city, Yakutsk, in the remote north-east of the country. Vladimir Putin's exact plans will be unveiled in September at an investment forum but experts say the centre will aim "to study extinct animals from living cells - and to restore such creatures as the woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave lion and breeds of long-gone horses". The cloning laboratories...

mammoth some 12,900 years ago. A team of two dozen scientists say the culprit was likely a comet that exploded in the atmosphere above North America. The explosions sent a heat and shock wave across the continent, pelted the ground with a layer of telltale debris, ignited massive wildfires and triggered a major cooling of the climate, said nuclear analytic chemist Richard Firestone of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, one of the scientists who presented the controversial new theory Thursday at a conference of the American Geophysical Union in Acapulco. At least 15 species, mostly large mammals including mammoths, mastadons, giant ground...

A construction crew in Cape Coral, Fla., in June discovered what is believed to be a bone fragment from a mastodon or mammoth, a report released Friday said.  The fragment was discovered underground by  crews working on the city’s utilities expansion project, The Fort Myers News-Press reported. It is believed to be a part of the animal’s humerus bone, according to The Cape Coral Daily Breeze.  It is not entirely clear how old the find is; The News-Press reported it could be more than two million years old, while NBC2 put it at somewhere between 12,000 and 250,000 years. What’s more, archaeologists think there could...

Just hope that the current interglacial period will last for a few more decades to come. Anything else would spell disaster for much of mankind! Lyuba, of course, is the name bestowed upon the baby mammoth that was found a few years ago in the western Siberian tundra. The baby woolly mammoth is thought to be around 40,000 years old (by now) and is thought to have died by drowning at the age of two months. What’s so remarkable is Lyuba’s state of preservation, almost life-like, with skin and (sparse) hair fully intact. That kind of find is most uncommon.

Paleontologists are in the final stages of extracting the skeleton of a huge mammoth discovered buried two metres underneath a busy street in the Mexican city Tultepec. New images of the excavation site have revealed the sheer size of the prehistoric animal, which experts believe died between 12,000 and 14,000 years ago in what is now the city's suburb of San Antonio Xahuento. With a metre-wide skull and tusks spanning more than ten feet, the skeleton belongs to Mammuthus Columbi, a North American mammoth which expects believe grew sixteen feet high and weighed up to 10 tonnes.

"Patagonia turns out to be the Rosetta Stone - it shows that human colonisation didn't immediately result in extinctions, but only as long as it stayed cold," says study leader Professor Alan Cooper, ACAD Director. "Instead, more than 1000 years of human occupation passed before a rapid warming event occurred, and then the megafauna were extinct within a hundred years." The researchers, including from the University of Colorado Boulder, University of New South Wales and University of Magallanes in Patagonia, studied ancient DNA extracted from radiocarbon-dated bones and teeth found in caves across Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego, to trace...

The geology of the site, as well as pollen and algae finds, suggest that the hunter-gatherers encountered the mastodon next to a small pond that both humans and animals used as a water source, the researchers believe. Waters said that the prehistoric "people knew how to find game, fresh water and materials for making tools. These people were well adapted to this environment. The site is a slam-dunk pre-Clovis site with unequivocal artifacts, clear stratigraphy and thorough dating." Another research team previously excavated the site and found what they believed were dog remains, so dogs "would most likely have been...

Scientists from the University of Oxford and the University of Manchester have used a new technique, "Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry," or ZooMS, to identify more than 2,000 bone fragments recovered from Russia's Denisova Cave. ZooMS analyzes the collagen peptide sequences in bone, which can then be used to identify its species. Among the remains of mammoths, woolly rhino, wolf, and reindeer, the researchers found one Neanderthal bone. "When the ZooMS results showed that there was a human fingerprint among the bones I was extremely excited. ...The bone itself is not exceptional in any way and would otherwise be missed by...

The carcass of one of a pair of extinct big cat cubs will be scrutinised this autumn with the realistic possibility that a liquid found in the remains of the animal is milk from the mother. Separately, it was recently revealed that samples of the prehistoric infant are being examined by South Korean to clone an animal that once occupied Eurasia from modern day Great Britain to the extreme east of Russia. A source close to the case told The Siberian Times that there is 'hope' the frozen remains of a cave lion cub will show evidence of its mother's...

Woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos and other large animals driven to extinction since the last ice age each succumbed to a different lethal mix of circumstances... Researchers who studied the fate of six species of 'megafauna' over the past 50,000 years found that climate change and habitat loss were involved in many of the extinctions, with humans playing a part in some cases but not others. But there was no clear pattern to explain why the animals died off, and it proved impossible to predict from habitat or genetic diversity which species would go extinct and which would survive. "It almost...

The 10,000 year old bones of a mammoth and other extinct mammals have been unearthed in the north end zone of Oregon State University's Reser Stadium. Construction crews digging up earth during the expansion of the Valley Football Center expansion project...

Battle scars on male mastodon tusks show these Ice Age giants were not the peaceful creatures once thought... The scars reveal they fought in brutal combat each year during seasonal phases of heightened sexual activity and aggression. The discovery, announced at a recent Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Ontario, counters the view that now-extinct mastodons were peaceful, passive creatures that rarely engaged in battles. It also strengthens the link between mastodon and modern elephant behaviour, since male bull elephants also fight seasonal, hormonally-charged battles to show their dominance and win desired mates... "Mastodon tusks curve upward strongly at the...