Mammoths Stampede Into Sports… As Mascots!

FLORA LICHTMAN: You might remember back in 1993 when the original Jurassic Park was released. It set off an explosion of “dinomania” in popular culture– toys, theme park rides, even a basketball team. The expansion Toronto Raptors took their name and mascot from the film’s velociraptors. Now it seems another prehistoric animal might be having its mammoth moment.

SPEAKER 1: Ready or not, here come the Moon Mammoths, the Erie Seawolves’ latest name change.

FLORA LICHTMAN: With the help of the show Last Week Tonight, a Minor League Baseball team in Pennsylvania rebranded themselves the Erie Moon Mammoths. That comes just a few months after the Utah NHL franchise renamed itself The Mammoth as a nod to the state’s paleontological past.

So why are mammoths back, and do they really have what it takes to be a successful team mascot? We’ll ask an expert on these woolly wonders. Dr. Advait Jukar is Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, based in Gainesville, Florida. Welcome to Science Friday.

ADVAIT JUKAR: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, so you study mammoths. Let’s get this out of the way.

ADVAIT JUKAR: Yep.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Are they or are they not mascot material?

ADVAIT JUKAR: They are totally mascot material. They are huge. The ones in North America were about 12 or 13-feet high at the shoulder. They weighed more than a big African elephant.

They had these massive, 12 to 14-foot long tusks. Big, massive, powerful creature. It’s got everything that your team needs.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do they have charisma?

ADVAIT JUKAR: They have so much charisma. They’ve got “rizz,” as the kids like to say these days.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [LAUGHS] Were the mammoths here woolly?

ADVAIT JUKAR: The mammoths down south in the US were probably not quite as woolly as the ones up in Alaska and Siberia. The species that we have down here, the Columbian Mammoth, was probably hairless.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hairless, like an elephant?

ADVAIT JUKAR: Just like a big elephant, yeah. They ranged all the way from Central America, all the way up to the Great Lakes. And if you’re down in Florida or Mexico or Central America, it gets pretty hot. And I’m not sure if you want to have a big furry coat when you live down there.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That makes sense. Now that you say it, of course, it makes sense. Tell me a little bit about mammoth life. Reintroduce me to them.

ADVAIT JUKAR: Mammoths are very much like elephants. They probably lived in matriarchal herds, just like modern day African elephants and Asian elephants. They were large grazing animals, so they had these specialized teeth that were quite well adapted for feeding on grass. But that also meant that they could eat pretty much anything that they wanted to on the landscape. Mammoths show up in North America about 1.5 million years ago, and they’re here on the continent up until about 12,000 or 13,000 years ago, when they finally go extinct.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Thanks to humans, or do we know?

ADVAIT JUKAR: Probably because of humans. This is a huge debate in paleontology and archaeology. And what we can say for sure, based on the evidence, is that you can’t explain all of these extinctions without humans.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Is there anything big happening in the mammoth field right now?

ADVAIT JUKAR: There absolutely is. So you mentioned Jurassic Park, and one of the hallmarks of that movie is that they managed to extract DNA. Now, that’s not really possible for extinct dinosaurs, but we do have ancient DNA from mammoths.

The oldest ancient DNA that we have from a mammoth comes from Siberia, and it’s about 1.2 million years old. I think it is the oldest ancient DNA that we’ve ever extracted directly from a species. And we have ancient DNA from the Huntington Mammoth, which was the basis for the Utah Mammoth mascot.

What we’ve found out blew all of our minds. The Columbian Mammoth, which is the species found in the lower 48 and Central America, is a hybrid species. About half of its DNA comes from Woolly Mammoths, and half of its DNA comes from a lineage of Steppe Mammoths that came down into North America about 1.5 million years ago. That paper came out in 2021, so this kind of blew up our conventional paleontological definitions for what this species is.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What do you hope this extra attention brings to mammoths?

ADVAIT JUKAR: I hope that it just rekindles people’s appreciation for our deep past. I think there’s a lot to learn about our past from these fossils, and a lot we can learn about the future from the extinction of these animals, as well. So I think if we pay attention to what went on in the past, we can do a much better job of conserving our future.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, I’m sold. Major League Baseball, we’re coming for you with The Mammoths. I mean, what’s a Met anyway?

ADVAIT JUKAR: Yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do you have a team you would pick to sub in The Mammoth for?

ADVAIT JUKAR: Maybe not the mammoth. But I live in Gainesville, and Gainesville High School, I think, should change its mascot to the Gomphothere. And a Gomphothere is a cousin of a mammoth.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [LAUGHS]

ADVAIT JUKAR: I mean, doesn’t the Gainesville Gomphotheres sound awesome?

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s a whole other segment.

ADVAIT JUKAR: Absolutely. And a Gomphothere is a four-tusked elephant, and that’s pretty rad.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, that’s awesome, too. Thanks for coming on.

ADVAIT JUKAR: Thank you so much.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Dr. Advait Jukar, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

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