A new analysis of the bones revealed that they are the fossilized remains of whales and not mammoths, as initially thought.
A set of two epiphyseal plates from a large mammalian spinal column, long thought to belong to woolly mammoths, have been re-identified as whale remains.
The bones were discovered in 1951 by archaeologist Otto Geist during an expedition north of Fairbanks, in a prehistoric region known as Beringia, Alaska. Given their enormous size and the abundance of Late Pleistocene megafauna in the area, Geist rightly concluded that they belonged to woolly mammoths. The specimens were archived at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, where they remained largely unexamined for more than 70 years.
This changed recently when the museum’s “Adopt a Mammoth” program funded radiocarbon dating of the fossils. The results immediately raised suspicions. Carbon isotope analysis dated the bones to just 2000 to 3000 years when mammoths will have disappeared from mainland Alaska. about 13 thousand years agowith only a few isolated populations surviving until approximately 4000 years ago.
“If accurate, these results would represent the youngest mammoth fossil on record,” biogeochemist Matthew Wooller of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and his colleagues wrote in the Journal of Quaternary Science Before rewriting the extinction chronology, however, the researchers took a closer look at the bones.
Stable isotope analysis provided a crucial clue. The bones contained levels exceptionally high levels of nitrogen-15 and carbon-13isotopes typically associated with marine food chains. These chemical signatures are rare in terrestrial herbivores like mammoths and have never been documented in mammoth remains from interior Alaska.
Suspecting a marine origin, the team resorted to genetic testing. Although the fossils were too degraded to yield nuclear DNA, the researchers were able to extract mitochondrial DNA. Comparisons showed that the bones corresponded to whalesspecifically the North Pacific right whale and the fin whale, reveals the .
While this solved the species’ mystery, it created a new one: how did the whale’s remains end up more than 400 kilometers from the nearest coast?
Researchers propose several possibilities. One of them is an unlikely “whale incursion into the interior” through ancient waterways, although Alaska’s rivers and lakes were not suitable for such large animals. Another possibility is human transport; ancient people are known to transport whale bones in other regions, although there is no evidence of this for interior Alaska. A third explanation is historical confusion, since Geist collected and donated specimens from across the state in the early 1950s.
