Sentences with phrase «modern elephants»

Climate - related nutritional stress is associated with delayed weaning in modern elephants, while hunting pressure is known to accelerate maturation in animals and would likely result in earlier weaning, according to Cherney and Fisher.

Woolly mammoths, the distant cousins of modern elephants, may have had the same social structures, the researchers suggest.

Columbian mammoths (Mammuthus columbi) may have moved like modern elephants with infants in matriarchal groups.

The two are so closely related that we can make direct comparisons, says Lister: habitat loss plus hunting could be a lethal combination for modern elephants too.

Biologist R. Dale Guthrie of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks largely agrees with the findings, but he says more work is needed to explain why some mammoths seem to have survived in regions colonized by humans and why many modern elephants live in areas easily accessible to humans, such as the African savannah.

Modern elephants survived in refuges uninviting to humans, such as tropical forests, says Surovell, whose team reports its findings online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

With a fun and modern elephant design in white and charcoal, it can be personalized for an extra-thoughtful gift.

Furry cousins of modern elephants, mammoths stomped their way across northern Eurasia and North America beginning 300,000 years ago.

Their footprint trails veer in unison, implying that the animals turned together as a herd, somewhat like modern elephants or migrating geese.

In modern elephants, herds of females and young live together, led by an experienced female, whereas males are more likely to live in bachelor groups or alone.

Woolly mammoths are thought to have had family structures similar to modern elephants, where herds consist of females and young elephants, whereas adolescent and adult males disperse from the herd and roam in smaller bachelor groups or alone.

If the extinction trend continues apace, modern elephants, rhinos, giraffes, hippos, bison, tigers and many more large mammals will soon disappear as well, as the primary threats from humans have expanded from overhunting, poaching or other types of killing to include indirect processes such as habitat loss and fragmentation.

Mammoths and mastodons, for example, likely had a two - year gestation period, akin to modern elephants, and would have typically produced just one offspring at a time.

The team wanted to use tissue from hundreds of mammoth carcasses found in permafrost to work out the relationships among the animals and compare them to their distant cousins, modern elephants.

«It was a big challenge to extract the DNA sequences from the fossil mammoths and mastodons and then to line these up with DNA from the modern elephants,» says Nadin Rohland, an evolutionary geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston and the study's lead author.

A large part of the exhibition is focused on the Proboscidea, the mammalian order containing both woolly mammoths and modern elephants.

In spite of their size, these big mammals were extremely vulnerable, as are modern elephants.

Woolly mammoths have been extinct for thousands of years, and modern elephants are far from equipped to handle the intense Siberian winters.

The pony - sized species, a distant relative of the modern elephant, is believed to have lived only on San Miguel, Santa Rosa, and Santa Cruz islands.