Sabre-toothed tigers, mastodons, woolly mammoths—these and many other spectacular large mammals are generally thought to have become extinct about 10,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, otherwise known as the last ice age. But it's becoming clear that some of these species clung on tantalizingly close to the present day. Thomas Jefferson's instruction to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to search for live woolly mammoths in the American West in 1804 was perhaps a little optimistic. But the species survived on Wrangel Island in the northeastern Siberian Arctic until some 4,000 years ago, making it contemporaneous with the Bronze Age Xia Dynasty in China. On page 684 of this issue, Stuart et al. report that another charismatic ice-age mammal that was thought to have become extinct 10,000 years ago — the giant deer or Irish elk (Megaloceros giganteus) — survived in western Siberia to the dawn of historic times. The finding lends weight to the idea that there is no one explanation for the so-called Pleistocene extinctions.
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