Woolly Mammoth

The Woolly Mammoth is Alaska's official state fossil, designated by the legislature in 1986. Mammuthus primigenius was a large proboscidean, a relative of today's elephants, that grazed the cold grasslands of Beringia during the Ice Age. Alaska was at the heart of that range, and its frozen ground has preserved mammoth remains better than almost anywhere else on Earth.

Unlike most fossil animals known only from bones, Alaskan mammoths have been recovered with hair, skin, and stomach contents intact. Permafrost acted as a natural freezer for tens of thousands of years, turning some specimens into near-complete time capsules.

The Woolly Mammoth stood up to 11 feet tall at the shoulder and weighed up to six tons, about the size of a large African elephant. Its most visible features were its long, spiraling tusks, which could reach 14 feet in large males, and its shaggy double-layered coat: coarse outer guard hairs up to three feet long over a dense woolly undercoat that kept it insulated in Arctic cold.

Mammoths were grazers. They ate grasses, sedges, and low-growing tundra plants, consuming up to 400 pounds of vegetation per day. Fossil stomach contents from frozen Siberian and Alaskan specimens show a diet almost identical to the plants growing on the same ground today.

Mammuthus primigenius went extinct on the North American and Eurasian mainland about 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age. A small island population on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean survived until about 4,000 years ago, making the Woolly Mammoth one of the last proboscideans to disappear.

Alaska designated the Woolly Mammoth as its state fossil in 1986. No other state has produced as many mammoth remains, and no other fossil is as directly tied to Alaska's landscape: the same permafrost that froze the mammoths still runs under much of the state today.

The connection runs through the gold fields. Starting in the late 1800s, hydraulic mining and gold dredging operations around Fairbanks tore through thick permafrost deposits and exposed thousands of mammoth bones, teeth, and tusks. Miners sold tusks, donated skulls to universities, and occasionally uncovered partial mummies. The Fairbanks area became one of the most important Pleistocene fossil localities in the world largely because of that industrial exposure.

The University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks assembled a major collection from these finds over decades, making it one of the leading institutions for Pleistocene research in North America.

Interior Alaska, particularly the Fairbanks region, is the core of Alaska's mammoth fossil record. The historic gold dredging fields around Fox and Ester, just north of Fairbanks, produced thousands of mammoth specimens from the late 1800s through the mid-twentieth century. Permafrost there preserves bones in exceptional condition, and occasional frozen mummies have been recovered with soft tissue intact.

Mammoth remains have also been found on the North Slope, the Seward Peninsula near Nome, and along river cutbanks across interior and western Alaska. Erosion along the Yukon, Tanana, and other rivers continues to expose Pleistocene material each spring thaw.