If you want to find out what
woolly mammoths were really like,
you’ve got two options.
Option one, travel back
thousands of years
to the Ice Age.
Don’t have
a working time machine?
Better go with option two, then.
Work out what mammoths
were really like
using all the evidence
they left behind,
from buried bones and tusks
to whole mammoths, frozen in ice.
The remains, or traces,
of prehistoric life
are called fossils.
Fossils provide many clues
about life in the past
and the scientists who study them
are called paleontologists.
So what do fossils tell us
about mammoths?
By cutting open the tusks 
and viewing them
under special lighting,
you can see growth rings
similar to the rings inside of a tree.
By counting these rings,
scientists know this mammoth
was 15 years old.
These mammoth teeth
also give us lots of information.
Paleontologist Professor Adrian Lister
studies these fossils
to better understand the sorts of food
a mammoth ate when it was alive.
[Professor Adrian Lister]
"So here’s the jaw bone
"and this is a kind of molar tooth
that is adapted for
"eating plant matter,
as all elephants and mammoths do.
"This one would suggest that 
this creature was eating
the leaves of trees and shrubs,
quite soft vegetation.”
But studying big animal fossils
like these
is just a small part of paleontology.
When a mammoth fossil is discovered,
paleontologists study
everything around it too,
from tiny snail shells
to ancient plant remains.
This helps them understand
more about the environment
in which the mammoth lived.
By studying fossils, 
paleontologists can discover
what life was like 
thousands of years ago
during the last Ice Age.
So who needs a time machine anyway?
