Currently, compulsion is unique to male elephants – during the mating season their testosterone levels can rise up to 140 times and they themselves become extremely aggressive towards others. Until now, there was no reliable information about similar sexual behavior in mammoths.
Researchers from the Mammoth Museum. Lazareva from the Siberian and Far Eastern Branches of the PA Russian Academy of Sciences NEFU, together with her colleagues from the Netherlands, the USA and France, compared samples of dentin – mineralized dental tissue – taken from the tusk of a male mammoth 33-38 thousand years old. year, a female mammoth that lived on Wrangel Island about five thousand years ago, and an African elephant killed during an exodus in Botswana in 1963.
Dentin is perforated in layers according to the chronological order of growth. Then, testosterone levels were determined in the samples by liquid chromatography and tandem mass spectrometry. It did not fluctuate in females and was less than the lowest in males. Jumps in testosterone levels can reach 20 times in a mature elephant and ten times in a mammoth. The researchers state in their Nature article that this difference may be due to the degradation of testosterone in the samples.
Source: Ferra
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