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Destination: Wrangel
Island in the Chukchi Sea off northeastern Siberia.
Objectives:
To recover bones and teeth of mammoths and other now-extinct mammals
that once lived on that island, and to recover genetic information
from the bones for systematic and pathological
studies.
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Why? To test
a new idea called the "hyperdisease hypothesis,"
which maintains that many of the mammalian extinctions that occurred in
the last 40,000 years were not due to overhunting or climate change,
as conventionally thought, but instead to the ferocious impact of newly-introduced
diseases. Wrangel Island is of great interest because this is the last place
on earth where mammoths are known to have lived. |
