Woolly mammoths: Facts about these extinct, shaggy beasts that once roamed the Arctic

Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) looked a lot like their modern elephant cousins, but they had special fat deposits and were covered in thick brown hair. This helped keep them warm in frigid Arctic regions, such as Siberia and Alaska, where they roamed. Males had large, curved tusks, which they probably used to fight over mates. Female woolly mammoths also had tusks, but they tended to be straight and much smaller than males' tusks.

Woolly mammoths existed as a species for about 700,000 years and went extinct about 4,000 years ago.

Most woolly mammoths died off by the time the last ice age ended 11,700 years ago, when the frozen grasslands they inhabited changed into warmer ecosystems. Scientists disagree about when mammoths disappeared from the mainland of North America. Fossils suggest they were gone by 10,500 years ago, but traces of DNA in ancient permafrost (ground that is permanently frozen) hint that the animals may have survived in the Yukon until 5,000 years ago.

Either way, some mammoths survived on Russia's Wrangel Island, off Alaska, until around 4,000 years ago. It's not clear what eventually killed these mammoths. Some studies suggest the Wrangel Island mammoths were so inbred they became sickly and died out, while others suggest a random mystery event wiped out the last woolly mammoth.

Scientists are trying to clone woolly mammoths and bring them back to places like Siberia and Alaska. Researchers are hopeful they can resurrect the species because the Arctic permafrost preserves mammoth corpses so well. Many of these long-lost beasts have been found with well-preserved teeth and skin that contain usable DNA. In 2024, scientists actually extracted the 3D structure of chromosomes from 52,000-year-old, freeze-dried skin, which they took from a mammoth discovered in 2018 in Siberia. Scientists haven't yet reconstructed the complete genome — all the genetic information — of a woolly mammoth, but that may not be necessary to create creatures that look an awful lot like the shaggy-coated beasts, researchers told Live Science.

Instead, researchers are planning to splice, or insert, genes for iconic woolly mammoth features, such as fur, fat and curved tusks, into the genome of a living elephant species. The scientists will then put these modified genomes into the empty egg cells of a living elephant,and grow the mammoth/elephant hybrid in an elephant surrogate, researchers told Live Science.

Woolly mammoths lived mainly in the Arctic, from Eurasia to North America. At the peak of the last ice age, when glaciers covered a lot of the Northern Hemisphere, they lived as far south as Spain and Illinois.

Woolly mammoths evolved in eastern Siberia, but the ancestors of both mammoths and elephants originally came from Africa. Mammoths only spread into the Northern Hemisphere around 3 million years ago, according to the Natural History Museum in the U.K.

While woolly mammoths preferred the coldest parts of the world, other related species, such as Columbian mammoths (Mammuthus columbi), lived all across North America and Mexico. Columbian mammoths were actually a little bigger than woolly mammoths.

Woolly mammoths were about as big as today's Asian elephants, according to AZ animals. Males stood about up to about 11 feet tall (3.5 meters) at the shoulder, while females were a bit shorter, at up to around 9.5 feet (3 m).

Woolly mammoths were heavy: Males could weigh in at 12,000 pounds (5,400 kilograms), while females were up to 8,000 pounds (3,600 kg), according to AZ animals.

Woolly mammoths were foragers and ate grass, as well as small, nutritious flowering plants that flourished in the environment where they lived. They may also have used their curved tusks to dig through trampled snow and eat dead or decaying plants that other foragers couldn't get to. Surprisingly, they may have also eaten their own dung, a 2015 study in the journal Scientific Reports found.