Scientists hung onto woolly mammoth fossils for 70 years — then discovered a huge mistake: ‘Something was amiss’
Scientists have discovered that fossils believed to be woolly mammoth bones for 70 years actually belong to two species of whales. The misidentification occurred when archaeologist Otto Geist found the bones in Alaska, leading to their incorrect labeling and storage at a museum. Recent tests revealed the fossils are between 2,000 and 3,000 years old, prompting questions about how they ended up far from the coastline.
- ▪The fossils were originally thought to be mammoth bones until DNA testing revealed they belonged to a minke whale and a North Pacific right whale.
- ▪The bones were found in Alaska by archaeologist Otto Geist in the 1950s and were mislabeled for decades.
- ▪Radiocarbon dating indicated the fossils were much younger than expected for mammoths, which went extinct around 10,000 years ago.
New York Post files mainly under news. We currently carry 11,015 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | New York Post |
| Canonical URL | https://nypost.com/2026/05/27/science/scientists-hung-onto-woolly-mammoth-fossils-for-70-years-then-discovered-a-huge-mistake-something-was-amiss/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 15:54:06 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T19:58:03.915Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T19:58:03.915Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | K5zPWBuLLFzK |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Archaeology Scientists hung onto woolly mammoth fossils for 70 years — then discovered a huge mistake: ‘Something was amiss’ By Ben Cost Published May 27, 2026, 3:54 p.m. ET The fossils were believed to be mammoth bones for 70 years -- until tests revealed a surprisingly different species. Science Alert See more of our coverage in your search results. Add The New York Post on Google Is it free woolly? Scientists were flabbergasted after discovering that the mammoth backbones that had been housed in an Alaskan museum for 70 years actually belonged to a whale, per a study published in the Journal of Quaternary Science.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at New York Post.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from New York Post
