Woolly Mammoth

Woolly mammoths were closely related to today's Asian elephants. They looked a lot like their modern cousins, except for one major difference. They were covered in a thick coat of brown hair to keep them warm in their home on the frigid Arctic plains. They even had fur-lined ears. 
Their large, curved tusks may have been used for fighting. They also may have been used as a digging tool for foraging meals of shrubs, grasses, roots and other small plants from under the snow. Though woolly mammoths went extinct around 10,000 years ago, humans know quite a bit about them because of where they lived. The permafrost of the Arctic preserved many woolly mammoth bodies almost intact. When the ground around riverbanks and streams erodes, it often reveals the corpse of a long-dead mammoth that looks much like it did when it died.
For example, in 2007 in Siberia, a pair of mummified baby mammoths were found. The bodies were so well preserved that CT scans found the mammoths died from choking on mud 40,000 years ago. The mud was like a "really thick batter that they got clogged in their trachea and they were unable to dislodge by coughing," said study co-author Daniel Fisher, the director of the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology. "It basically prevented them from taking them another breath." Botanist Mikhail Ivanovich Adams recovered the first Siberian woolly mammoth fossils in 1806. Over a dozen soft-tissue specimens have been found since then. Woolly mammoths were around 13 feet (4 meters) tall and weighed around 6 tons (5.44 metric tons), according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature(IUCN). Some of the hairs on woolly mammoths could reach up to 3 feet (1 m) long, according to National Geographic. 
Category:Extinct Animals
Category:Mammals
Category:Cenozoic Animals