Scientists say the species survived in isolation for 7,000 years before going extinct.
Arppe and colleagues have now looked at mammoth bones and teeth found on Wrangel Island and compared them with other populations of mammoths. They looked at carbon and nitrogen isotopes that provide information on nutrition and metabolic functioning in the thousands of years before they went extinct.
The team found the Wrangel Island mammoths were comparable to their Siberian counterparts in terms of dietary wellbeing. However, there were some key differences. The Wrangel Island mammoths appear to have used fats as a dietary resource differently—results indicate they relied on their fat reserves to survive the colder winters. The mammoths in warmer climates did not need to do this, Arppe said.
They suggest"icing events" may have severely harmed the population. This is where rain on snow causes an area to become covered in ice, preventing access to food."These types of events have been known to cause deaths of large numbers of large herbivores in the arctic. 20,000 musk oxen were starved to death in 2003 in the Canadian Arctic due to a rain-on-snow event," Arppe said.
They also found evidence that weathering may have led to a reduction in access to freshwater, which may also have played a role—something they now plan to investigate.
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