Content area
Full Text
MAMMOTHS ROAMED OVER MUCH of North America until about 10,000 years ago. Most of them lived up to their name--they were big animals, standing as much as 14 feet high at the shoulder. But at the close of the last ice age, the Channel Islands, 20 miles off the southern California coast, were home to a most unmammoth-like mammoth--a pygmy mammoth less than half the size of its large relatives. Until recently, paleontologists had found only scattered bones of this oxymoronic beast. But last June a geologist studying marine terraces stumbled upon some bones poking out of a dune on the island of Santa Rosa. They turned out to be part of a pygmy mammoth skeleton, missing only a foot, a tusk, and a couple of vertebrae. "This little guy is the first nearly complete specimen for the entire New World," says Larry Agenbroad, a geologist and mammoth expert at Northern Arizona University, who helped uncover the bones.