Ancient tooth suggests woolly mammoths roamed Quebec over 100,000 years ago

A recent analysis of a tooth found in Nunavut suggests that woolly mammoths roamed Quebec over 100,000 years ago.

A tooth seems to have changed the past — a mammoth tooth to be exact.

A McGill University-led re-examination of a 19th-century fossil suggests that the giant creatures featured on Utah’s NHL team sweaters once roamed much further than believed and even strolled into what is now Quebec.

“This shows us that there are still discoveries left to be made all over eastern Canada,” said study lead author Louis-Philippe Bateman, a master’s student in the Department of Biology. “Now that we know woolly mammoths likely ranged here, it’s very tempting to go out and look for some more. They can turn up in the most unexpected of places.”

McGill said in a news release that the worn-down tooth, which was discovered just under a century-and-a-half ago in 1878 on Long Island in Nunavut, was thought to belong to a Columbian mammoth.

The study published in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, however, reclassified the find as an older, woolly mammoth, which, the university said, makes it the most northeasterly woolly mammoth find in North America.

The study, which reassessed the tooth’s morphology, date and isotopes, discovered that the animal had a tough final stretch with nitrogen levels higher than expected, meaning it may have been suffering from malnutrition.

“We interpreted this as a sign that the mammoth was under a form of nutritional stress; it had to catabolyze its own tissues to survive,” said Bateman, who said it was the first project he worked on as an undergraduate student.

“I skipped class, hopped on a bus, and visited the Canadian Museum of Nature collections in Gatineau, where I took hundreds of pictures of the tooth and other mammoth teeth,” he said.

The team then did some “high-stakes dentistry on precious fossil remains,” for an isotopic analysis.

According to the researchers, the mammoth ate “typical Ice Age vegetation” and probably lived during an interglacial period around 130,000 to 100,000 years ago.

“A specimen kept for almost 150 years still has secrets to reveal,” said Bateman. “Studying them can give us insights into how organisms evolve and respond to climate change.”