Mammoths, considered the ancestors of today’s elephants, lived without problems in North America and Eurasia for hundreds of thousands of years, having managed to adapt and thrive even in Siberia, from whose ice well-preserved mammoth bodies have been recovered. It was even exported DNA of these well-preserved mammoths and a research effort is underway to bring them back to life in a project that has also caused significant reactions for several reasons.
It is estimated that the last mammoths lived around ten thousand years ago and the cause of the extinction of these animals has not been determined, with several causes having been proposed, the main ones being climate change on the planet and human hunting or possibly a combination of these two. factors.
With publication In the magazine “Earth History and Biodiversity” an international research team indicates a new and unexpected factor that, if not the only culprit, contributed significantly to the disappearance of mammoths.
The pollen
According to researchers, at the end of the last ice age, climate change on Earth and the resulting warming caused an explosion of vegetation resulting in the release of gigantic amounts of pollen, literally forming pollen clouds in the steppes and areas where mammoth populations lived.
Exposure to so much pollen caused, according to researchers, allergic reactions in the animals, resulting in partial or even total loss of smell and preventing them from communicating normally with each other. The inability of one mammoth to smell another during the breeding season and thus copulate would lead to a sharp decline in the size of their populations and, eventually, extinction.
“One of the possible mechanisms of animal extinction during climate change could be the alteration of smell due to the development of allergies when the flora changes. Animals use their sense of smell to find food and mates, to navigate during migration, and to avoid predators, so the mammoths’ blocked sense of smell may have doomed them. The objective of this work is to propose a new evolutionary mechanism for the extinction of mammoths and other animals based on the interruption of communication”, say the researchers in their study.
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