Musth is a physiological phenomenon in elephants that is associated with mating dominance and aggression in males. Observed for centuries in captive Asian elephants used in warfare, musth was first documented in wild African elephants in the 1980s. Meanwhile, skeletal pathologies that apparently resulted from male-male fighting in mammoths and mastodons have for decades been interpreted as evidence that extinct relatives of living elephants also experienced musth, and new analyses of testosterone preserved in tusk dentin corroborate these interpretations. Measurements performed on tusk samples using liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry show that woolly mammoth bulls had annual surges in testosterone that matched those indicative of musth episodes in modern elephants. In addition to documenting musth in a third elephant species, these data show that dental remains preserve steroid hormones that can persist for thousands of years and can be used to study endocrine physiology in paleobiological and archaeological contexts.

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Image credit Adam Rountrey, compiled from DALL-E (2) outputs.