How mammoths lost the extinction lottery

 Researchers who studied the fate of six species of 'megafauna' over the past 50,000 years found that climate change and habitat loss were involved in many of the extinctions, with humans playing a part in some cases but not others. But there was no clear pattern to explain why the animals died off, and it proved impossible to predict from habitat or genetic diversity which species would go extinct. For a more consistent picture, scientists charted the population dynamics of woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, wild horses, reindeer, steppe bison and musk ox. As the climate  warmed, woolly rhinos, woolly mammoths and the Eurasian populations of musk oxen went extinct as populations became more and more isolated from one another. But these extinctions happened thousands of years apart, and the animals' ranges changed in different ways. So at the end scientists concluded that temperature and human interaction were the main causes for mammoth extinction.