MAN: About 140,000 years ago in what's now South Dakota, a mammoth approached a sinkhole filled with steaming water.

Lured by vegetation, the mammoth ventured into the water.

But with its flat, heavy feet, it had little hope of ever scaling the steep, muddy sides of the pond to climb out.

With no hope of escape, it either starved or drowned, eventually being covered by silt and preserved.

And it wasn't the only one.

To date, the remains of 61 mammoths have been excavated from the mammoth site of Hot Springs, South Dakota, all victims of an ancient sinkhole.

And one of the most intriguing things about these dead mammoths is that the vast majority of them are male.

Woolly mammoths roamed Eurasia and North America for millions of years.

They foraged mainly on grasses, along with some shrubs, mosses, and herbs.

They fended off wolves, cave hyenas, and big cats with their large bodies, huge, curved tusks, and powerful trunks.

The life of the mammoth was probably a lot like the life of their distant cousins, the elephants.

But what caused the extinction of the mammoths is still a matter of debate.

They disappeared from Europe and North America at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago, though some small groups hung on for much longer by hiding out in remote areas.

The very last mammoths died out on a small island in the Arctic Ocean around 4,000 years ago, around the same time that the ancient Egyptians were constructing the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Experts blame the mammoth's extinction mostly on a rapidly changing climate with maybe a little hunting by us as well.

And today we've teamed up with TierZoo to solve one of the mysteries about these charismatic megafauna, gamer style.

As TierZoo put it, the mammoth's top-tier gear and high HP dominated the Pleistocene meta.

But climate change doesn't explain the nagging mystery about our favorite Ice Age proboscidean.

Why do most remains of mammoths found in the fossil record turn out to be male?

[MUSIC PLAYING] Even without humans hunting them or the ice sheets melting, mammoth life was dangerous.

The Ice Age tundra could be an unforgiving place to live-- dry, dusty winds, bitter cold, frozen earth, not swampy like our modern tundra, but still no picnic.

And even if the cold or wind didn't get you, the tundra was full of deadly traps that sent unsuspecting inhabitants to an early grave.

In 1901, a group of scientists from St. Petersburg ventured into the Siberian tundra.

After several months of chasing tips from locals, they saw-- or rather, smelled-- something extraordinary.

It was a woolly mammoth embedded in the frozen banks of the Berezovka River.

Its head and neck had thawed enough to rot, attracting scavengers.

These scavengers were eating meat that was thousands of years old.

I just want to emphasize that.

After they slowly dug the carcass out from the bank, the team's paleontologist examined it closely.

Its leg bones and pelvis were broken.

Its blood vessels had torn open, causing blood to pool around its muscles.

He said the creature fell from a cliff along the river and was smothered by the ensuing landslide of half-frozen mud.

Game over.

The Berezovka mammoth would turn out to be a famous early example of this kind of accidental preservation.

Fast forward to 2007.

A reindeer herder found another carcass along a frozen Siberian river, this time on the Yamal Peninsula.

It was a small woolly mammoth calf only about a month old.

Fermenting bacteria had taken over the remains, pickling the carcass and thwarting scavengers.

Lyuba, as she was named, was fat and healthy when she died.

But her skull was full of nodules of iron phosphate, a sign that a lot of blood had flowed to her brain just before she died.

This was clear evidence of the mammalian diving reflex that activates when a mammal's face is submerged in cold water and has to hold its breath.

She also had sediment in her trunk, trachea, and lungs.

Poor Lyuba seems to have face-planted into some soupy mud and suffocated while trying to clear it from her trunk.

Like the Berezovka mammoth and Lyuba, many mammoths' lives were claimed by the treacherous landscape of the tundra.

But for paleontologists, dramatic deaths like these are a goldmine.

Since these specimens were buried quickly, they were shielded from scavengers like wolves.

So their bodies had a much better chance of being preserved.

And these accident victims can reveal incredible details about how mammoths lived.

The Berezovka mammoth had half-chewed leaves and grasses between its teeth.

Lyuba still had her mother's milk in her stomach.

But a freak accident, like falling into mud and suffocating, could happen to anyone, right?

The fact is, even if they stayed far away from environmental hazards, mammoth life was still not easy.

In the Little Badlands of Nebraska in 1962, a couple of workers discovered a large thigh bone while surveying for a dam.

Paleontologists quickly descended on the scene and unearthed the remains of not one, but two Colombian mammoths, the larger, southern cousin of the woolly mammoth.

And the tusks of the two males were locked together in mortal combat.

They each had a broken tusk.

And one had run its task through the eye of his opponent-- brutal.

These bull mammoths, later named Benny and George, met about 10,000 years ago and died fighting over-- you guessed it-- sex.

We're pretty sure this is what happened because modern bull elephants also get into aggressive confrontations and fight each other with their tusks, often for access to females.

They go pretty wild during the breeding season because of raging hormones during a phase called "musth."

Researchers were able to confirm that these animals died during the spring, which was their mating season, by looking at levels of carbon and oxygen isotopes in their tusks.

They're high in the summer and lower in the winter.

And Benny and George looked like they just passed through the winter low point.

They also had the thin growth rings in their tusks that were consistent with mature males when they're in musth.

During their battle, one of the two must have slipped, dragging the other to the ground.

Exhausted and locked together, they starved.

Their heavy bodies started to sink into the wet, muddy earth.

And then they were covered with sediment, maybe from a flood, preserving them for thousands of years to become one of the most unique mammoths ever discovered.

And like Benny and George, most of the mammoths recovered by paleontologists, again, are male.

Even a 2017 genetic study of Siberian mammoth bones, teeth, tusks, and hair revealed that over 2/3 of the 98 mammoth fossils were male.

So why is the mammoth fossil record so male-dominated?

It may be because female mammoths knew how to stay out of trouble a bit better.

Just like modern elephants, young female mammoths probably stayed close to their female relatives.

Elephants live in matriarchal family groups led by the wise, old females.

The matriarch uses her decades of experience to keep her younger sisters, nieces, and grandchildren hydrated, fed, and safe.

Mammoths likely had a similar family structure.

And we can infer this from their remains.

When we find the bones of a single mammoth, they're usually from a male.

And only in rare cases are huge groups of young and female mammoths found together having met their end in a sudden catastrophe, like we see at Waco Mammoth National Monument in Texas.

It all points to a female-centric family group.

Female mammoths likely stayed close and learned from their family members, while the males, on the other hand, went off on their own, early and unprepared.

After leaving their family group in a quest for mates, these young male mammoths made deadly mistakes that female mammoths rarely made.

But that's how I would explain it to you.

TierZoo can explain it to you another way.

MALE NARRATOR: In order to complete the mating quest line, the male mammoth bull generally was forced to engage in much riskier gameplay and more PVP than a female mammoth was.

Just like the elephants of today's Anthropocene meta, a successful playthrough on a male mammoth involved leaving the safety of their party once they leveled up enough to reach sexual maturity.

With no teammates to defend them if things got ugly, far more low-level male mammoth players died from things like environmental hazards and ambushes than female ones do.

And on top of that, the mating quest line forced them into potentially deadly duels with other bulls.

Female players, on the other hand, would have far more protection from ambushes, had more opportunities to learn to avoid common environmental hazards, and never were forced to battle each other to reproduce.

Thanks, TierZoo.

This is very cool to be doing.

The natural traps of the Pleistocene were great at preserving the remains of males who had made mistakes in wonderful detail, which means that we have better fossils from them than we do from mammoths who lived long, boring lives.

So it's not that there were more male mammoths.

It's that they tended to more often die in ways that would better preserve their remains and also their mistakes for us to examine in the future.

And now museums around the world are stocked with male mammoths.

But what does this mean for people who study mammoths?

Isn't it a problem that most of our information about them comes from males?

Well, yes and no.

With mostly male remains, we miss out on a lot of important parts of mammoth life because we don't have a good comparison point for the males.

Although mammoths show some sexual dimorphism, like differences in pelvis size, we can't get a good sense of the degree of that dimorphism.

Did male mammoths have bigger feet?

Did female mammoths have smaller ears on average?

It's hard to say without a good set of remains from both sexes.

But the hole in the fossil record in the first place also tells us something just because it's there.

It tells us that male mammoth life was somehow very different from female mammoth life because young male mammoths were much more likely to die in accidents.

So as TierZoo might put it, for low-level male mammoth builds, not knowing about the traps of the Ice Age meta often led to an early game over.

And for the human players, the lack of female mammoth loot clued them into the mysterious early game, the most famous build of the Quaternary expansion.

But for us here at Eons, our takeaway is sometimes the information you don't have is just as important as the information you do have, which is good news for anyone who is working with a limited fossil record.