What does the mammoth tooth look like?

Mammoths ... They seem to us so close and distant at the same time, each person knows how they looked, but none of the people living on the planet have seen these creatures live. We only approximate the height and weight of the animal, the mammoth's tooth looks like, how much food it needed in a day. A lot of Yakutian legends and scientific hypotheses are associated with mammoths. Let's try to find out which of the abundance of information is true.

Who is a mammoth?

Under the word "mammoth", the average person understands the long-dead animal of the elephant family, covered with wool and having gigantic dimensions. According to scientists, the last mammoths extinct on our planet more than ten thousand years ago, but in fact, everything is not so simple.

To date, paleontologists have found and described more than eleven species of mammoths. And not all of them were covered with a thick layer of wool, the most famous are tundra and woolly mammoths. It is their remains in large numbers found in the territory of Yakutia.

Legends of Mammoths

From time immemorial, the northern peoples have found strange bones of enormous size sticking out of the earth. In ordinary people, they caused a holy horror and tried to avoid them. The Yakuts believed that under the earth lives a huge beast that dies of sunlight. Therefore, to see the tooth of a mammoth or its tusk was considered an omen of death and future terrible events.

The very name of the extinct animal came from the language of the northern peoples. In the translation the word "mammoth" means "earth horns". This is what the first explorers of the North heard about the origin of strange bones protruding from the ground. Since then, fossil elephants have become known as mammoths.

What did the mammoth look like?

The appearance of the mammoth can be reconstructed only by the remains found in the permafrost. Most often, scientists get fragmentary parts of the skeleton, in some cases covered with wool. But sometimes on the surface of the earth there are almost perfectly preserved bodies of mammoths, which can be reliably judged on the appearance of these majestic animals.

Most mammoths weighed more than twelve tons and reached a height of about six meters, which greatly exceeds the size of modern African elephants. The body of the mammoth was covered with wool cover, depending on the habitat, it had a different degree of density. Curved tusks helped the mammoths shovel snow and get themselves food, which was necessary for the animal in large quantities. Scientists have found that for normal life, especially in the cold winter period, the mammoth should have eaten more than one ton of plant food per day. The molar tooth of the mammoth was able to grind any vegetable food. Modern science claims that the structure of the teeth would allow the animal to feed even coniferous trees.

How long have mammoths died out?

For a long time it was believed that the mammoths disappeared from the face of the Earth about ten thousand years ago, it is this period that date all the finds of mammoth skeletons in the territory of Yakutia and Alaska. But not so long ago a group of scientists who conducted surveys on Wrangel Island discovered the remains of animals resembling tundra mammoths, but much smaller. For example, the tooth of a woolly mammoth weighs more than ten kilograms, but at the found specimen it hardly reached two kilograms. As it turned out, the scientists were lucky enough to stumble upon a dwarf variety of mammoths that had a height of not more than two meters. Their weight did not exceed two tons, for all other parameters they corresponded to the remains of tundra mammoths previously found in permafrost.

Surprised scientists are not even their size, and the age of death. All the animals found did not die earlier than three thousand seven hundred years ago. That is, we can say with confidence that the mammoths did not die out at the dawn of mankind, but much later. But the cause of their mass extinction still causes many scientific disputes.

How many teeth does a mammoth have?

Despite its enormous size, the mammoths had only four molars, which helped them to grind vegetative food. Surprisingly, throughout the life of the mammoth, six changes of teeth occurred. Three times he had dairy molars and three times constant teeth. The change took place quite unusually - the new mammoth tooth gradually replaced the old one, and at certain intervals the mammoth could have six, or even seven teeth in the jaw simultaneously. In addition to the molars, the mammoth had two curved tusks.

The old animal stitched the last pair of teeth completely, after that the mammoth perished from hunger. Most often for this purpose he left the pack and found a secluded place. Now such places are called mammoth cemeteries, and they are a storehouse of information about extinct individuals.

What does the mammoth tooth look like?

A photo of the found teeth of a fossil animal can now be found in many sources. For several photos it is easy to recreate their appearance. The mammoth's tooth had a very interesting structure - it was like a grater consisting of individual plates completely covered with enamel. Between the plates were firmly fastened and merged into a single whole. The mammoth's tooth was a tuberous surface, allowing to cope with absolutely any food.

Mammoth tusk: is it considered a tooth?

At first, scientists argued for a long time whether to consider a tusk as a tooth of an animal or not. A thorough study of the bodies of mammoths of different ages allowed us to assert that the tusk is the tooth of the mammoth. The photo of the tusks found in the section confirmed this theory. Now it is known that the tusk is a modified chisel, and its direct purpose was to find food and in some cases to tear it from the ground.

Tusks did not change as often as molars. The mammoth had dairy tusks that fell with age. But the permanent mammoth raised all his life, they were slightly curved in the inside, which greatly facilitated the production of food.

An adult male tusk could weigh over a hundred kilograms and grow to four meters in length. In some cases, tusks broke off, in particularly severe cases, an animal with a broken tusk could die.

How can mammoth teeth be used?

Carvers on bone consider mammoth teeth an amazing material, from which you can make things of extraordinary beauty. But to get the tusks of the mammoth is rather difficult, they are of high cost and are rarely of high quality, suitable for carving.

Mammoth tusk has a mesh structure and several shades. The most rare are cream and black colors, they almost immediately go for export. Exporting mammoth tusks is not prohibited by law, so most of the bones found go to China. There they are used for medical purposes as a dietary supplement. The best quality tusks go to the Chinese carvers on the bone. The price of a small product from the mammoth's tusk can reach several thousand dollars.

The molar teeth of the mammoth are also very amenable to processing, often they make pendants and statuettes. The already treated tooth has a multilayer structure with beautiful color transitions. In one product can combine all shades of beige, black and even orange, so they are all unique. Many products made from mammoth teeth are sold at specially organized exhibitions and auctions.

It is not known how many more mammoths are hiding in the permafrost of Siberia. After all, a few large bodies that are suitable for study annually thaw out. Perhaps someday scientists will manage to fulfill their dream and clone a mammoth, then each person will be able to get acquainted with these amazing giants of antiquity.