Woolly Mammoth - Secrets from the Ice

In this one off special and her first as a professor, Alice Roberts follows scientists on the hunt for new Woolly Mammoth finds and reveals the natural history of these wonderful, mysterious and unfortunately extinct animals. Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) had tucks twice the size of those worn by elephants today and as their name suggests they wore a woolly coat of hair, individual strands of which could grow to a metre in length.

With increased permafrost melting in the Arctic, mammoth carcasses are being revealed, allowing lots of research into their adaptations and evolution to take place.

The episode begins in Siberia, where in current climate the temperature is around -40C for months throughout the year. 100,000 years ago the land of Siberia was home to herds of woolly mammoth, a place where precious few animals can live. But they died out at the end of the last ice age.

We've been collecting specimens of woolly mammoths for the past 200 years and know that they could live for up to 60 years due to their adaptations to cold. Alice shows us Lyuba, the remains found in 2007, and radiocarbon dated to 30,000 year old, of a very well preserved mammoth that was only around 1 month old - so much so that there a traces of the hair, skin, and gut content.

Lyuba, it is thought, died in a bog and was pickled by natural chemicals. She then quickly became frozen. Alice tells us that Lyuba is one of a handful of frozen specimens ever found, that they are very rare as they normally decompose before freezing can take place.

Our history with mammoths began in Europe and we quickly began painting them. Then when they were extinct, we made them mythical creatures. More recently the Ice Age series of films has brought back to life the interest in mammoths.

Increased musclature in the neck and a hump were adaptations of carrying such large tusks. Below the latitudes of the glaciers was the Mammoth Steppe an uptapped resource available for any animal able to adapt to the cold. The extremes of the arctic environment drove adaptations from their southern hemisphere origins to an arctic animal. Their teeth show that they had a common ancestor 6 million years ago, which ate soft vegetation, but 3 million years ago we see the first migrations of mammoth from Africa to the North. Adaptations occurred quickly, their tails and ears shrank to conserve heat and they had a layer of fat up to 8cm thick. Mammoths had 4 molar teech and increased ridges to deal with the tougher plants of the steppe. The shape of the end of their trunk was also shaped to help them pick up grass to eat. Additionally they had massive kidneys, like desert adapted camels - to handle the plentiful food but minimal water environment.

Alice then introduces us to Bernard Buigues, the man who brought Lyuba in from the cold. With 450 remais of mammoths collected over 20 years, we now have a lot to go on. With Bernard's relationship with the indigenous peoples, he's able to be the first scientist on the scene for every mammoth discovery.

Professor Dan Fisher, the world's leading mammoth tusk expert is next on our list. We find that mammoth tusks grew throughout the life of the mammoths, even to a visible (microscopic) daily growth. Alice and Dan then cut open a tusk for analysis and Dan's enthusiasm is tangible even through the laptop screen. We see that there are light (summer) and dark (winter) lines representing the year. Dan sands down the cut tusk and then shares with us the tusk under ultraviolet light, allowing us to see the detail. Tusks, like teeth, grow from the jaw outwards and the UV allows us to really see the definition of growth from root to tip. This reveals things like where they got their water from, their food from and at what age they were weaned off their mother's milk. It also allows us to see another similarity between the mammoth and modern day elephants: periods of starvation, during musk when the male tries to find a female and fails to eat.

We then meet Stephan Schuster who uses mammoth hair to collect their DNA. Using his method we've found that mammoth hair could be blonde, brunette, or ginger in colour! Dr. Kevin Campbell explains that mammoth haemoglobin protein, which delivers oxygen around the blody, adapted to allow mammoths to live in such cold conditions. Of course no mammoth blood exists, but with the mammoth instruction code he has been able to use host bacteria to produce modified elephant DNA into functional authentic mammoth haemoglobin. He found that the mammoth protein worked much better in colder enviroments than mice or human protein, allowing them to conserve heat and energy.

Going back to Bernard, he shares with Alice a brand new mammoth carcass that seems to have been interferred with by humans. But did we kill it, or make use of it after dead? It may be years before we know.

A typical Alice Roberts programme. In a word, excellent. I even like the new hair style!