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Solving The Woolly Mammoth Conundrum: Amino Acid 15n-Enrichment Suggests A Distinct Forage Or Habitat, Rachel Schwartz-Narbonne, Fred J. Longstaffe, Jessica Z. Metcalfe, Grant Zazula

Earth Sciences Publications

Understanding woolly mammoth ecology is key to understanding Pleistocene community dynamics and evaluating the roles of human hunting and climate change in late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions. Previous isotopic studies of mammoths’ diet and physiology have been hampered by the ‘mammoth conundrum’: woolly mammoths have anomalously high collagen δ¹⁵N values, which are more similar to coeval carnivores than herbivores, and which could imply a distinct diet and (or) habitat, or a physiological adaptation. We analyzed individual amino acids from collagen of adult woolly mammoths and coeval species, and discovered greater  ¹⁵N enrichment in source amino acids of woolly …