worse fates than to end your days fighting for your very reason for being. And the Buesching mastodon’s reason for being was reproduction. The line connecting him with his ancestral past stretched back further not only than his elephantine brain could possibly have conceived, but further than any brain at all could have conceived until radiometric dating pinpointed the birth of planet Earth to a cosmic moment 4.54bn years ago.
Tusks are giant teeth. And teeth contain calcium phosphate. This is the material that strengthens them. But calcium is in the same column of the periodic table as strontium, a rarer element, so the two are chemically similar—so similar that natural selection has never bothered to learn the difference. If the tusk-assembly process comes across a strontium atom, it incorporates it as though it were calcium, no harm done.
Where, then. And when. Reluctant to remove for isotopic analysis more that the bare minimum of material from their precious sample, Dr Miller and Dr Fisher concentrated on the years when the animal was between 11 and 16 years old, and between 31 and 34. But they had other information as well. Nutritional stress shows up in the appearance of the growth layers, as does damage caused by fighting other mastodons.
At the height of his powers as a full-grown adult, though, all signs of stress are gone. Now he was migrating seasonally—returning in the early summer to a much smaller area near the centre of his range that seems to have served as a mating ground.
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