It was previously believed that the woolly mammoth became extinct in the Bering Land – the region that connected Northeast Asia with Northwest America – around 13,000 years ago. However, analysis of DNA extracted from permafrost has led some scientists to believe that small populations of these massive animals may have survived into the Holocene epoch.
In 2022, the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska launched a project called "Adopt a Mammoth" to search for the "youngest" mammoth, whereby all the fossils (1,500 pieces) in the museum are being accurately dated using radiocarbon dating over several years.
According to the Journal of Quaternary Science, two bony plates from mammoth vertebrae were found in Alaska in the mid-20th century, and were believed to belong to a mammoth that lived between 1900 and 2700 BC.
But the results of isotopic analysis were surprising, showing that the animal fed on seafood. Subsequent analysis of ancient DNA revealed that the fossils actually belonged to two whales, one a North Pacific whale and the other a porpoise, with one plate dating back 1,879 years and the other 1,168 years.
This discovery raised questions about how the remains of ancient whales ended up in sedimentary rocks far from the coast, before experts concluded that these fossils had mistakenly arrived in the museum's collection among Alaskan coastal artifacts.
