Morphological analysis reveals frequent dental anomalies and malocclusion in Columbian mammoths, suggesting potential nutritional stress or inbreeding during the Late Pleistocene.
Malocclusion and/or dental malformations were found in individuals of Mammuthus columbi (Falconer, 1857) from 15 Late Pleistocene localities in the Basin of Mexico. We hypothesise that malocclusions and/or malformations result from either nutritional deficiencies and a lack of essential minerals for dental development or genetic isolation and inbreeding. Our sample suggests that problems with the masticatory apparatus may be frequent in M. columbi, at least in Mexico, and thus should be studied on a broader geographical and chronological scale. Although our study cannot clarify the underlying causes, we suggest that future work should focus on the recovery of paleogenomic data as a primary research direction.
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Rodríguez-Franco et al. (2026) studied this question.
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