The expedition found more than 600 remains of large mammals of the Late Pleistocene of Northern Eurasia. These remains date back at least 11,000 to 17,000 years.
The mammoth remains were in excellent condition. The paleontologists believe that bones buried on the lowest level belong to animals that came to Wolf Mane long before those mammoths, whose remains were found in the 1960s.
“We believe that this area […]has been one of the last places where these representatives of the mammoth fauna existed, when in most places they had already become extinct. We want to understand why. We hope to find remains of these animals that lived 10 thousand years ago or even less,” said Sergei Leschinski, head of TSU's Laboratory of Mesozoic and Cenozoic Continental Ecosystems, as cited in the press release.
According to the scientists, many mammoths had signs of disease of their skeleton system. Presumably, mammals were suffering from mineral starvation which attracted them to the area. They came here to eat deposits rich in macro- and micro-nutrients.
The expedition was organized by TSU in the framework of the 2nd International Summer School, in which students from Russia, France and Kazakhstan all participated. The key aim of the expedition was to examine mammoth fauna at new locations in the Novosibirsk region.
