Baby Mammoth Remains Found
One of the best preserved mammoths ever found was recently unearthed in Siberia. Even her eyes are intact, though her tail seems to have been bitten off.
So now there's talk, again, of cloning a mammoth. The article seems to be saying that, given viable DNA from the specimen which is not guaranteed by any means, we now have the technology to produce a hybrid mammoth/elephant, if not a pureblooded clone. But there are ethical questions- should you resurrect extinct prehistoric animals? The mammoth is about the only one we could, since they are the only ones who were thoughtful enough to be buried in ice. Where would the mammoth live? Personally I would love to see a living mammoth- it would be amazing. But would it be right? I don't know. I suspect that if they do it, though, it will mean there is an associated ethical imperative to resurrect as many of the extinct modern species that have died off due to human intervention. So that would be a good side-effect.
A good book on the technology (though now out of date) and ethics of this issue is Mammoth: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant, by Richard Stone.
Anyways, here is a great mastodon sketch Travis Hanson made for me a few months ago:

Polar bears and woolly mammoths were contemporary, though just for a very brief period. Mammoths came out of Africa nearly 5 million years ago, and then died out probably around 10,000 years ago, though the most recent mammoth remains, from Wrangel Island, date to as recently as 3700 years ago.
Polar bears evolved from grizzlies about 30,000 years ago. Which possibly makes them the youngest species of megafauna on the planet, though I don't know for sure. Wood bison might be younger (but are they a species or a sub-species??), or some other beast. Anyways, the point is, for about 20,000 years polar bears and woolly mammoths frolicked together on the tundra.
Did you know woollies are more closely related to African and Asian elephants than the two types of elephants are to each other? Crazy eh? And there's a population of grizzlies on Alaska's ABC Islands (Admiralty, Baranof and Chichagof) that is more closely related to polar bears than mainland grizzlies. Thus it seems likely that maritimus evolved from this isolated population of horribilis.
I'm not a geneticist so I only have a murky grasp of how they figure those things out.

Very briefly (I have one more shift this week so it's past my bedtime), allow me to introduce you to Renzo Rivadeneira- Wenzmaster! I asked him to draw Homie Bear riding a Woolly Mammoth, since I believe it is a paleontological fact that bears and mammoths were good friends back in the Ice Age. As you can see, they liked ice cream! Though ice cream is rarely preserved in the fossil record.
Maybe when I get home I'll post some more info on my Peruvian artist friend. He is available for commissions, btw.

The Mystery of the Sasquatch
by Little Homie Bear

My report about mammals is about sasquatches, who are giant apes or cavemen or something that lives in the woods and mountains of North America. Also their cousin the yeti who some people call the abomable snowman who lives in the Himalayas mountains in Nepal and Tibet, which are two countries very far away from here where they have Mt Everest the tallest mountain in the world.
Anyways, there is very little known about these mysterious denizens of the primodial forest. Some scientists even claim that there isn't a such a thing as a bigfoot (which is what some people call sasquatches because of their big feet). But I don't know how they can say that when they also say that they have an uncertainty principal. But what IS known about the sasquatches is they are undoubtedly very big. Hopefully they eat plants and berries and not bears, but I think they don't because otherwise we would see more of them I think and have more fights. And I don't want to fight with these mythical beasts who might be from the Ice Age. Other animals that are from the Ice Age are the woolly mammoth, and I bet that the sasquatches rode on woolly mammoths.
The End

It's Paleo Day Here at the Woods!
When I was in elementary school I knew all about dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. I wanted to be a paleontologist. As cool as dinosaurs were, with their alien monstrousness, I was even more partial to the just-slightly-removed-from-us world of the prehistoric mammal, such as Titanotherium (I pulled that name out of 23-year-old memory banks), sabre-toothed tigers (which, everyone knows, aren't tigers at all; Smilodon) and hominids such as Neanderthals. I had a like-minded friend named Peter. At recess we were often to be found playing outside in the snow (Canadian winters being ideal for simulating ice age conditions) pretending to be mammoths. We ran around calling each other Nathan Woolly Mammoth and Peter Woolly Mammoth.
Remember that old NFB fim of the stop-motion mammoths? I sooo thought they were real when I was a young Woolly Mammoth.