Typically, fossils offer information about animals from the past. But understanding details about how the animal lived has not been previously possible. New techniques, however, are allowing more information to be gleaned from these artifacts. Now, an international research team has retraced the lifetime journey of an Arctic woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) and found that it covered enough of the Alaska landscape during its 28 years to almost circle the Earth twice.
Image: A view of a split mammoth tusk at the Alaska Stable Isotope Facility at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Karen Spaleta, deputy director of the facility, prepares a piece of mammoth tusk for analysis in the background. [JR Ancheta, University of Alaska Fairbanks
