Fossil Mammoth Tooth Cross-Section

Mammuthus primigenius, also known as the wooly mammoth, a relative of elephants, roamed the earth from around 5 million years ago until approximately 4 thousand years ago. Leading contributors to their extinction include the end of the ice age, drastically limiting their available food sources, and being hunted by man. They ate a specialty diet, using their tusks to dig through snow to find frozen grass in the wintery tundra. Mammoths spent most of their life traveling in herds across what is known today as Alaska and northern Canada as ice dwindidled and tempetures rose.