The Many Mammoths of Alberta
Nick Carter, Marketing and Communications Volunteer
March 13, 2025
Visitors to the Royal Alberta Museum see mammoths everywhere - from the mounted skeleton and isolated bones and teeth in the Natural History Hall, to the statues in the lobby, to our very logo itself. There’s a good reason for this too. Not only does this well-known animal of the recent past represent the meeting point of Alberta’s natural and human histories, but during the Pleistocene epoch when the Ice Age was in effect, this province was home to at least two different mammoth species.
There’s the familiar woolly mammoth of course, which lived across northern Eurasia and North America. With its shaggy coat of brownish fur, it’s probably what most Albertans imagine when mammoths come to mind. There’s also the Columbian mammoth, an even bigger species and a distinctly North American one too.
Palaeontologists long thought that these two species had no overlap in their North American range, with the woolly mammoth keeping to the cold northern steppe-tundra and the Columbian mammoth occupying the warm grasslands to the south. Over the decades, however, we’ve learned it’s not quite that simple. Not only have remains of these two species been found from nearby localities, but we also know they occasionally interbred with one another. This means that, for at least some point in history, the fluctuating ranges of woolly and Columbian mammoths overlapped in western North America.
To RAM palaeontologists Christina Barron-Ortiz and Chris Jass, Alberta seems to be a likely place for this range overlap with possible hybridizing to occur. In a recent study published in Quaternary Research (Barrón-Ortiz et al, 2025) they took a close look at the record of woolly and Columbian mammoths in the province to learn more about which mammoth species was living in what part of the province throughout the Pleistocene. Based on their previous research (Jass and Barrón-Ortiz, 2017) they expected to find some specimens that shared features with woolly and Columbian mammoths due to interbreeding between the two, but predicted that in general woolly mammoths would be more common.
In order to tell specimens from one mammoth species from the other, Christina and Chris along with their colleague Tasha S. Cammidge looked at teeth, specifically the chewing teeth from the back of the jaws. There are two good reasons for this: firstly, teeth are durable, more so than bone, so they tend to hold up against the damage that thousands of years in a gravel pit can do. Secondly, unworn molar teeth of woolly and Columbian mammoths look different enough that palaeontologists can often use them to tell what sort of mammoth they’ve got on their hands. Some teeth, however, show a mixture of features between the two species and possibly indicate overlap in range between them where interbreeding may have occurred.
The authors measured and applied radiocarbon dating to 14 mammoth molars in the RAM collections from across Alberta in order to identify and age each specimen. To widen the search, they also used data on teeth collected from Alberta and housed in the Canadian Museum of Nature and Royal Ontario Museum. This led to some interesting results.
Most of the mammoth teeth analysed in this study were pretty old, geologically-speaking. Older than the current radiocarbon dating limit of around 45,000 years in fact- quite a bit earlier in time than when the Pleistocene ice sheets were at their last extreme about 20,000 years ago. One specimen from the Canadian Museum of Nature, however, was both more recent and more precise in age at 10,930 years, give or take a century.
Nine teeth that were characteristic of Columbian mammoths were identified, and these ranged geographically from the northwest near Peace River down to the southeast around Medicine Hat. Six identified from woolly mammoth teeth ranged from southeastern Alberta as well but no further to the northwest than the Edmonton area, which is also where two teeth with overlapping features were found. While the presence of these “intermediate-form” teeth in Alberta was no surprise, fewer turned up than expected. The abundance of Columbian mammoths over woolly mammoths, on the other hand, is certainly surprising. While these results might seem to add greater clarity to our understanding of mammoth biogeography in North America during the late Pleistocene, if anything they raise more questions.
That’s science for you.
It’s long been known that Columbian mammoths were common from the middle of North America down to Central America, and were a characteristic part of a more “southern” collection of species on this continent. But now we have records of them from northwestern Alberta. Do these findings mean that Columbian mammoths ranged further north than we expected? Are we seeing the remains of southern populations that wandered north during certain points in time? Or, as the authors of this paper hypothesize, could at least some of the older Columbian mammoth remains described here actually be from a third species, the steppe mammoth, that lived slightly earlier in the Pleistocene? It’s worth noting that the molar teeth of steppe mammoths and Columbian mammoths are just about impossible to tell apart. We can’t say for now which scenario is likely to be correct, but it’s a question they’re hoping to answer with future work looking at ancient DNA preserved in the teeth.
None of the Albertan remains identified as woolly mammoths reveal anything unpredicted. In North America this species ranged from Alaska and Yukon to south of the Canadian border, so remains from near Edmonton and Medicine Hat are to be expected. As for the teeth that showed a mix of both woolly and Columbian mammoth features, they could represent instances of co-occurrence of these species. Or, perhaps they’re just the teeth of individuals from one species that look a bit like the teeth of the other species, whichever it might be. We can’t tell for sure right now, but perhaps future studies will reveal more.
One thing we can tell is that the youngest tooth used in this study, the one dated to about 10,930 years old, came from a Columbian mammoth around Bindloss near the end of the Ice Age when the glaciers were receding northwards for the last time. This, along with other probable Columbian mammoth teeth of similar age, at least indicates that this species did move back northward as glacial ice retreated.
As the palaeontologists have revealed in this study, what we thought we knew about the mammoths of Alberta is turning out to be more complicated than expected. Examining the teeth of these animals has helped us learn something about when and where certain species were living and how they evolved, but more and different types of studies will help to fill in the big picture.
On that note, anyone can help scientists discover more. If you think you’ve found an Ice Age fossil, get in touch with RAM palaeontologists. It’s an easy way for all Albertans to contribute to the understanding of our prehistoric past.
References
Barrón-Ortiz CI, Jass CN, Cammidge TS (2025). Taxonomic, biogeographic, and biological implications of mammoth teeth from a dynamic Pleistocene landscape in Alberta, Canada. Quaternary Research 123, 41–58. https://doi.org/10.1017/qua.2024.47
Jass, C.N., Barrón-Ortiz, C.I., 2017. A review of Quaternary proboscideans
from Alberta, Canada. Quaternary International 443, 88–104.