When Mammoths Roamed

First published on 11 Mar 2009. Updated on 5 Apr 2011.

At the height of the last ice age 21,000 years ago, woolly mammoths roamed the grassy plains of the northern hemisphere. And though mammoths never lived in Australia, they have captured the local imagination.

"It's so much part of our culture. We talk about things being 'mammoth' without even thinking where the word comes from," says Louise Berg, coordinator of When Mammoths Roamed, a temporary exhibition at the Australian Museum. "It's kind of quirky and interesting that it's become part of the English language even though they've been extinct for thousands of years."

Discovered mammoth bones and tusks were thought to belong to mythological creatures such as unicorns, until the late 1700s, when scientific reason prevailed. The mammoth, it was learned, was an extinct cousin rather than an ancestor of the elephant.

It's clear that the two creatures are related when you stand before the 3.6 metre tall model of an adult male mammoth, nicknamed Felix, at the museum. The reproduction, which looks like a shaggy elephant, towers over the small children who run up to it, marvel at the curved tusks and trunk, and pose for photos. Felix is accompanied by a baby mammoth model with matching synthetic brown hair.

Also included in the exhibition, on loan from the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, is the best specimen of an actual mammoth found to date. A 10-month-old baby, called Dima, was trapped in ice and preserved intact (albeit squashed and mummified). Another highlight of the exhibition is a skeleton discovered in Siberia, belonging to a mammoth that weighed five tonnes and spent 18 hours a day eating 80 litres of water and 180 kilograms of grass.

The mammoth's size provided a windfall of meat for prehistoric people who hunted the animal and used its bones and tusks to make crafts and build huts. In the cold climate on the steppe, the mammoth was protected by one-metre long hair, two-centimetre thick skin, and an eight-centimetre fat layer. As the Earth warmed, these grasslands were replaced by forests.

Mammoths first appeared half a million years ago and last disappeared from the Arctic islands 4,000 years ago. Why did they vanish? It’s a mystery you can probe at the Australian Museum.

"The exhibition is encyclopedic," says Berg. "I don't think there's anything you could want to know about mammoths that you don't find out in the exhibition." Lisa Varano