The CA Channel Islands with mammoths were actually connected to the mainland due to low sea levels during the height of the ice ages, and the populations later cut off and underwent the “dwarfing” common for megafauna on small islands.
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That’s why most pachyderms stick to snorkeling.
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“Pygmy Mammoth”. An oxymoron worthy of George Carlin: “Jumbo Shrimp”
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I read a book by Irina Shapiro once, and she made that experience seem somewhat gruesome and depressing. Maybe it depends on the object involved, but with that ability I’d stay away from bones. 
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Ew, yeah, the last chapter of those bones’ story is probably the worst bit 
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serious question. how does a tusk survive 100,000 years but the ground isn’t littered with the bones of every whale and big fish or whatever else fell to the ocean floor that has died in all that time. or maybe it is??
i guess i gould say teh same about shipwrecks. sometimes if seems like they find these almost intact ships that are hundreds of years old and yet the titanic has almost disintegrated i to a pile of rusty and barnacled parts.
(i’m not trying to be snarky. i feel like this is a question i wish i could as as a kid in a museum tour talking to a paleontologist and id get some rad answer that would make me wanna be like them when i grew up.)
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You sure about that?
/sneaks up from behind and, with tongs, drops a personal object of Donald Trump down the back of your shirt.
Not fresh ones, no. Although ones that have been buried for a while can float if there are a lot of hollows in them as I can say from personal experience.
That said, this is a tooth and those don’t float.
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It all has to do with the local environment where the wrecks settle. Most of the ocean is full of life, including microorganisms that decompose organic matter (like the wood from a shipwreck). Those parts of the seas also tend to be full of oxygen, which is needed to oxidise the metal from a shipwreck.
The wrecks you see that are perfectly preserved are from parts of the oceans (or lakes) that for different reasons don’t have these conditions.
The Black Sea:
The Baltic:
or the Great Lakes:
In other parts of the world the conditions are not as positive, so the image one imagines about finding pirate shipwrecks in the Caribbean never look like this:
In reality Carribbean shipwrecks of the period look like this:
A scattering of artefacts only really visible after careful cleaning of the sea floor.
It’s the same in the Mediterranean, for example, where you will never find a sunken Greek trireme in its full glory because the sea is too warm and too full of life.
This for example is the Uluburun shipwreck, a famous wreck from the Bronze Age(!) off the coast of Turkey.
Of course oxygen saturation is also affected by depth, so some deep ocean finds could hide perfectly preserved shipwrecks even in otherwise more hostile seas.
That said, I suppose in this case it’s the fact that it’s a tooth that lead to it not decomposing. IANAM (I am not a microbiologist) but just from experience in field archaeology teeth are often the only parts of a skeleton that survive in hostile conditions.
I am not sure about the Titanic only being a pile of rust by the way. She is deteriorating thanks to microorganisms but for now she’s still majestic:
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wow!! i didnt actually expect such a full reply (with pictures too!) thank you!! (and yeah i guess i was wrong about the titanic. i thought i had seen images where it was much further gone than that.)
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To be absolutely clear: the above is an artists’ rendering of the Titanic wreck as it is impossible to take a picture like that just due to lighting conditions. But actual photomosaics of the site (from 2012) show pretty much that situation:
(I should also add that the person who made that picture combined the images of the bow and stern sections. The ship broke up during the sinking, as we all know, so the two sections are actually about 600m apart on the ocean floor)
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