A pair of woolly mammoth vertebrae in Alaska have been dated to around 2,000 years old, making them by far the most recent evidence for the existence of this extinct beast ever recorded. However, upon further analysis, researchers discovered that the fossils are not in fact of proboscidean origin, and instead belong to a couple of whales that somehow ended up hundreds of miles from the ocean. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

The specimens were discovered by the German explorer and naturalist Otto Geist in the early 1950s close to the inland city of Fairbanks, and were donated to the University of Alaska Museum of the North, where they were cataloged as mammoth vertebral epiphyseal plates. In 2022, radiocarbon dating re

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