The anthropologist and geologist Brooke Crowley, from the University of Cincinnati, in the United States, is convinced that mammoths and mastodons, at least those that roamed the American Northeast until between 9,000 and 11,000 years ago, were animals more sedentary than usual. to be believed.
In general, most paleontologists have been arguing that these large proboscidia did not usually stay in the same territory for long, but preferred to keep moving.
However, the data obtained by Crowley’s team suggests that when they found an area with sufficient resources, they stayed there. In fact, both species settled in different areas, depending on where they found their favorite foods.
“There are marked differences between the fossils of one region and another,” says Crowley, whose study has been published in the journal Boreas. “The mammoth populations that inhabited what is now New York did not behave in the same way as those that lived in Florida, for example.” To determine this, the scientists studied teeth from different specimens kept in museums in Ohio and Kentucky.
The analysis of the stable isotopes of certain elements (non-radioactive atoms with different numbers of neutrons than normal ones) contained in them provides clues about the life of animals.
Thus, the isotopic signature of carbon provides information about their diet, while that of oxygen shows the climatic conditions they had to deal with. That of strontium, on the other hand, can be used to know their origin and determine if they were displaced while their dentitions were forming.
Examination of the remains revealed that mammoths consumed more herbaceous plants than mastodons (they preferred leaves and shrubs) and that the latter chose enclaves further from the ice and closer to the forests.
Of course, in almost all cases, the strontium revealed that they ingested water from the same region, which questions whether they were nomadic mammals. The researchers hope their work can be used to devise new conservation strategies for elephants in Asia and Africa.
