In The Event That...
You Want to Passive-Aggressively Stick It to the Seven-Day-Creation Loonies
"Tusks! Ice Age Mammoths and Mastodons"
Runs through Jan. 7, $4-$6, 4840 Kennett Pike, Wilmington, Del., 302-658-9111, www.delmnh.org
The Philadelphia Zoo has kicked out the elephants, but don't cry: The Delaware Museum of Natural History has something much, much cooler. The enthusiastically named "Tusks! Ice Age Mammoths and Mastodons" is a rare opportunity to learn the differences between mastodons, mammoths, spiraltuskers and shoveltuskers. (How are they the same? Right, they're all dead.)
The exhibit features more than 80 fossils and artifacts related to the creatures, who roamed North America before disappearing some 10,000 years ago. For the most part, anyway—dwarf mammoths lived on Wrangel Island off Siberia until 4,000 years ago. In other words, when the Egyptians were building the pyramids (and, according to my Hebrew school teacher, doing coke from South America), li'l mammoths were still scampering about.
Scientists aren't sure why mastodons et al went extinct, but post-Ice Age global warming is one theory. Recently, scientists in Canada and Japan have been experimenting with extracting DNA from the mammoths' frozen bodies—the animals may be genetically similar enough to Asian elephants to create an elephant/mammoth hybrid. Then, we could totally test the global warming hypothesis.
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