Dating Alaska's Mammoths
When did they go extinct?
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - When did woolly mammoths go extinct in Alaska? Radiocarbon dating shows that mammoths died out on St. Paul Island around 5,600 years ago, but on mainland Alaska, the dates are much older.
Using dated mammoth fossils, it appears that mammoths died out between 13,000 and 14,000 years ago.
But in both neighboring Canada and Siberia, the woolly giants were around until about 10,000 years ago, so it is likely that Alaska’s mammoths were still around then too, and a program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks hopes to prove it.
For a fee, the Adopt A Mammoth Program will not get you a mammoth, but it will sponsor the radiocarbon dating of a mammoth specimen. The Museum of the North at UAF has about 1,500 mammoth specimens in its collection.
The hope is to get all of the specimens dated and to gain a more accurate idea of when mammoths died out on mainland Alaska.
And when you adopt a mammoth, you get to name it too.
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