Scientists are shown scraping the dirt from a rare mammoth skull fossil in a photo released by the National Park Service.
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Geologist Dan Muhs of the U.S. Geological Survey, who also worked on the excavation, said that the new skull suggests there may have been multiple mammoth migrations from the California coast to the Channel Islands’ shores – one during the most recent ice age, which started about 30,000 years ago, and one during the previous glacial period about 120,000 years before that. But, the skull is also relatively small compared to that of a pygmy mammoth, a subspecies of the Columbian mammoths, that stood six feet tall. So the two most likely explanations is that this is a juvenile Columbian mammoth, or it could represent a transitional species that was partway through evolving from Columbian to pygmy. According to our experts, the animal could have met the man of Arlington, considered the oldest human specimen found also on the island of Santa Rosa.
That means this species of mammoth may have lived on, or at least visited the Channel Islands, during the end of the Pleistocene era – around the same time as the prehistoric Arlington Springs Man.
The fossil was found in an eroding stream bank on Santa Rosa Island in the park.
‘I have seen a lot of mammoth skulls and this is one of the best preserved I have ever seen’. The team said that the specimen is rare because it is not big enough to be categorized as a Columbian mammoth or small enough to be a pygmy mammoth.
Scientist named the skull “Larry”, after Peter Larramendy who is the National Park Service biologist who first spotted the mammoth’s ivory tusk sticking out of the ground and Larry Agenbroad, the late paleontologist who excavated a mammoth graveyard in South Dakota.
A debate over whether humans caused the mammoths’ extinction has been raging throughout the scientific community for years, and another finding of the two species in close proximity will only fuel the fire.
Mammoths first appeared in North America roughly 2 million years ago.
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The scientists have said that they intend to determine the creature’s exact species and age at the time of death via further investigations. The skull will be preserved for future public display in the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. The pygmy, or dwarf, mammoth – Mammuthus exilis – probably existed on the islands for about 60,000 years before going extinct around 10,000 years ago, as did many large mammals for reasons as yet unknown.
