Larry Agenbroad - obituary - Telegraph The combination of youth, inexperience and freedom is a dangerous one for young bull elephants - and, Agenbroad surmised, for the young mammoths, who would have been attracted to the vegetation growing along the shores of a warm pond. The journey down to the food source, however, would have been a one-way trip as the animals slipped down the shale into the water. Although they were probably good swimmers, they would have been unable to find a foothold and so were doomed. The reason the sinkhole contained no mammoth calves, he suggested, was that they would have been too well-protected by the females in the group, while the absence of elderly males probably reflected the fact that they were less reckless than their younger brethren. Larry Agenbroad at the Hot Springs Mammoth Site in 2009 (ALAMY) Larry Delmar Agenbroad was born on April 3 1933 on a farm near Nampa in Idaho and took a degree in Geologic Engineering from the University of Arizona, followed by a doctorate in Geology in 1967. He spent most of his academic career at Chadron State College and at Northern Arizona University. It was while participating in an archaeological dig of a prehistoric site in Arizona in the 1960s that he became interested in mammoths. The archaeologists were interested only in human remains and artefacts, throwing aside the bones of giant mammoths who were killed there. As well as his work at the Hot Springs Mammoth Site, where he was site director for nearly four decades and helped to create a research centre and museum, in 1983 Agenbroad was called in to examine a site in Utah, containing the first samples of ancient mammoth dung ever found in the Western Hemisphere. Later, he and colleagues found other deposits, totalling about 300 cubic yards of dry mammoth manure, spanning a prehistoric period from 28,000 to 11,670 years ago. Agenbroad described the dung deposits as "scatological time capsules that can reveal - with precision heretofore unknown - how vegetation and the climate in which ... [the mammoth] thrived" was changing. In particular, he hoped that the deposits of dung might help researchers settle the question of whether the animals died out due to loss of habitat as a result of climate change or whether they were hunted to extinction by man. A Columbian Mammoth on view at the Hot Springs museum (ALAMY) In 1999 Agenbroad took part in an expedition to Siberia to study a mammoth discovered by reindeer herders, who spotted a tusk poking up from the permafrost. Carbon dating and analysis of the teeth indicated that the mammoth, a male, died about 20,000 years ago at the age of 47. The discovery caused a stir in the scientific community because the specimen was almost biologically perfect, with blood, organs and even stomach contents preserved intact. Agenbroad supported a proposal to try to clone the animal by extracting DNA and letting it develop in the egg of an Asian elephant, but the DNA extracted proved too fragmented to be of any use. Hopes were raised again in 2007 when the remains of a baby woolly mammoth were discovered by reindeer herders at another Siberian site. The baby mammoth, nicknamed Lyuba, is the most perfectly preserved mammoth discovered to date, even containing its mother's milk in its stomach. Scientists have already decoded 70 per cent of the woolly mammoth's genome, and Agenbroad remained optimistic that with the discovery of Lyuba, they could finish the job. Meanwhile he installed a replica of the baby animal at the Hot Springs museum. Larry Agenbroad is survived by his wife, Wanda, and by two sons. Larry Agenbroad, born April 3 1933, died October 31 2014