How Prehistoric Mammoth Tusks Could Help Bust Modern-Day Ivory Smugglers

Selling the elevation of the elephant, elephants are harsh white material from the elephant tus. Sell ​​the ivory collected from the remains of cast mammoths, but not somehow. Because two are difficult to get out of separation, illegal traders are legally sold to the elephant’s ivory and slip under the radar. A new trial tool, however, can end soon with the approaching trick.

In China, lawyers of wildlife offer the authorities that the authorities can distinguish the mammoth ivory by analyzing the ivory Fixed isotopes (forms of an element that is not fragmented over time). If this approach is widely accepted, it can serve as a quick sample examination before applying more expensive and time-consuming methods.

“Mammoth ivory is a part of the ivory price, but both are completely different materials by Carver and experts, because the elephant ivory is deep, creamy white,” Pavel Toropov is the author of the work published today in the magazine Boundariessaid on a border statement. “A trader compared them to ‘Lamborghini and a Ford’. Mamonty ivory could not be a true substitute for the elevation ivory, but its value can be a legal cover for the elevation.”

Currently, the two ceres are also separately, the most accurate way to separate each other, molecular analysis (a technique of molecules) or radiocarbon (techniques that are so far), both expensive and time consuming.

Isotope ratio varies depending on factors such as the environment. Mammists protected in the high width of the ice cycle in Siberia Permafrost, lived in a completely different habitat in today’s tropical elephants, and the isotope proportions in TUSSOTOP should be different. In this context, Toropov and his team decided to investigate the two types of analysis of these differences.

The team analyzed 35 mammoth ivory 35 mammoth ivory, 35 mammoth ivory, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur with 35 mammoth ivory. In this approach, the ratios of lawn, nitrogen and sulfur isotope ratios, researchers in two years, the researchers fell very little overlapped for oxygen.

“This is a different isotope signatures in the water elements of the water, which are drunk by mammoths in high-level areas such as Siberia, there are different isotope signatures compared to the water elements of the elephants,” The first author is a researcher at the University of Maria Santos. It is simply an effective way to determine if the suspicious ivory object analyzes the stable isotope ratios of oxygen and hydrogen rates, an elephant or mammoth.

Although this approach is conducted in court before being used in the court, “We hope that the protocol described in our research will be applied to large groups of the screen,” Santos. “Examples with isotopic signature of the elephant ivory can then be tested with more expensive and time-consuming methods as radiocarbon acquaintance. This can help the illegal ivory trade and close the potential to combat the potential.”

The way I see, there is a simpler solution: Be all the ivory illegal.