The cover story of the August 13, 2021, issue of the journal Science focuses on the tusk of a male woolly mammoth that died during the last Ice Age north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska. The 7.9-foot tusk, collected in 2010 and deposited in the University of Alaska Museum of the North (UAMN), has been sliced and diced and analyzed across no less than 340,000 microscopic data points to match isotopes of strontium and oxygen contained within its layers to isotopic maps of such minerals all across Alaska. Pat Druckenmiller (director of UAMN) compares the effort to reading “a diary…written in their tusks.” The tip shows the day this bull was born while the base shows the day it died, with nitrogen signatures indicating starvation at the end of life.
Kate Britton (University of Aberdeen, UK) calls this “an ‘iso-biography’ for a single individual.” Some scientists would dearly like to slice open and conduct isobiographies of still more tusks contained within museum collections, which leaves museum curators nervous about using so-called “destructive sampling techniques” on their prized possessions even in light of the scientific value that could be revealed by cutting a few fossil tusks.
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