![]() ![]() The animals, part of a group of 55 observed not long before the Feb. They have a lot of fat, so they are pretty hardy," Quinley said.īut they don't move much in winter, and if you stay in one place and something bad happens in that place, your chance of survival isn't good, he said. "Their metabolic rate, it drops by a significant amount. The animals were reintroduced to Alaska early last century with stock from Greenland. The animals disappeared from Alaska in the mid-1800s - overhunting is one possibility. But they also have a knack for dying in batches.Ī 2004 flood on the North Slope's Coleville River wiped out 13. Musk oxen are hard-core survivors with ancestral Ice Age roots. They were believed healthy.Ībout 1,000 musk oxen are believed to occupy the Seward Peninsula and the dead musk oxen can give clues about the rest of the herd, Quinley said. Scientists will check teeth to learn ages, leg bones to determine body fat, and do other work to understand the animals condition at death. "It doesn't seem practical to chip them out of the ice, so the plan is to come later in the spring and summer as things thaw to take samples," Quinley said. The Park Service gave the location only as a low-lying area on the northern coast of the Seward Peninsula, in the 2.6-million-acre preserve that was once part of the ice bridge connecting Asia and North America. The shaggy corpses of 32 musk oxen were found in the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve on March 15, horns, dreadlocks and hunks of the animals emerging from the ice. Officials don't want "souvenir hunters" messing with the unusual scene, which could give scientists a rare glimpse into musk ox health on the Seward Peninsula, said John Quinley, an NPS spokesman. The National Park Service won't release the location of the 30-plus musk oxen it believed drowned in a February tidal surge before becoming encased in a mass grave of ice.
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