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Woolly mammoth
The hair and skin on preserved mammoths show how well they were insulated. Most mainland populations disappeared thousands of years before the last known herd. On Russia’s Wrangel Island, woolly mammoths survived until about 4,000 years ago. That late survival is one reason a single date gives a misleading picture of their disappearance.
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Woolly rhinoceros
Preserved remains reveal a thick coat, while fossils across northern Eurasia put this rhinoceros in the cold landscapes of the last glacial period. One of the youngest known specimens came from a wolf’s stomach in northeastern Siberia. It dates to about 14,400 years ago, and studies differ on how much hunting contributed to the decline as the climate changed.
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Smilodon fatalis
The La Brea Tar Pits have a rich record of this saber-toothed cat. Radiocarbon dates show that it disappeared from the local record around 13,000 years ago, as southern California was becoming drier and experiencing more fires. The tar pits give you a local timeline that can be compared with other sites.
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Megalonyx
Jefferson’s ground sloth
The mounted skeleton shows large claws and a powerful frame. Fossils come from across North America, but relatively few specimens have been dated directly. One from Ohio lived about 13,100 years ago, providing a late record for this particular ground sloth.
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Irish elk
The antlers on this giant deer look startling beside the rest of the skeleton. Irish bogs yielded famous fossils, but the animal lived across parts of Europe and Asia. Bones from western Siberia date to about 7,700 years ago, placing at least some populations well into the Holocene.
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Cave bear
The abundance of bones in some European caves gives you a record of a bear that used them for shelter. One analysis of dated remains put its disappearance around 26,000 to 24,000 years ago. That was well before many of the larger mammals that disappeared toward the end of the last Ice Age.
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Diprotodon
This was a very large Australian marsupial related to wombats and koalas. Its large front teeth and sturdy skull make it easy to recognize in a museum. Fossil dates and interpretations differ, but several studies put late populations at around 45,000 years ago, well before many of the mainland losses in North America.
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Glyptodon
A solid dome of small bony plates covered much of the animal’s body. In a museum mount, compare those plates with the movable bands on a living armadillo. Glyptodon belonged to a larger group of armored mammals in the Americas that disappeared near the end of the Ice Age. Fossil shells help paleontologists distinguish several forms.
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Dire wolf
Thousands of dire wolf bones from the La Brea Tar Pits give an unusually detailed record of this predator. The youngest dated remains there put its local disappearance close to those of other large mammals. That cluster helps researchers ask what happened to the whole food web as the landscape changed.
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American Mastodon
Molars with rounded peaks helped the mastodon crush twigs and other woody plants. The teeth are an easy way to tell a mastodon fossil from a mammoth fossil, where the chewing surface has parallel ridges. American mastodons disappeared about 11,000 years ago, after surviving earlier shifts in climate.
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Steppe bison
The Alaskan mummy nicknamed Blue Babe preserves part of the animal’s skin and outline. Steppe bison lived across Beringia, including northeastern Asia and northwestern North America. Bones from Whitehorse in Yukon suggest that one population survived until about 5,400 years ago, long after Blue Babe lived.
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Camelops
Camelops hesternus
The long legs on a mounted skeleton show how familiar an Ice Age camel can look. Fossils place Camelops in western North America, where it vanished near the end of the Pleistocene. Researchers analyzing its ancestry found a closer connection to the line that includes camels in Asia and Africa than to the one containing living llamas.
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