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by gameswithgo 2469 days ago
I don't understand the argument. All mammoths die.
2 comments

Yes, but not all mammoths fossilize.

Fossilization is rare. Most deaths result in recycling the animal into nutrients for other things (animals, fungi and bacteria). For land animals, fossilization involves either dying under circumstances that are likely to promote fossilization or under circumstances that are likely to quickly move your body to a location that allows fossilization. Getting stuck in a quagmire or tar pit, or getting swept away trying to ford deep, fast-moving water drives your chances of fossilization up considerably.

1) location of death (or final resting place, anyway) matters a ton for likelihood of fossilization,

2) not all animals die in the same places,

3) if sex has an influence on the distribution of likelihood of dying (or ending up in—water carries corpses, predators and carrion-eaters may drag them) in fossilization-friendly locations, we'd expect to see a difference in the rates of fossil discovers of that species by sex, different from whatever actual distribution there was of male & female in the original population.