Carbon Test Determines Whether A Piece Of Ivory Is Legal Or Illegal
Baby Elephant with Tusked Adult Richard Muller, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory The test is based on the spike in radioactive carbon in the Earth's atmosphere during the Cold War. One way poachers get the big elephants they want is by shooting a baby elephant, first. The young animal won't have a lot of ivory on it, but the kill draws in the mother, whom the poachers then shoot, too, as Scientific American reported in 2009. That Scientific American article described a DNA tool for tracing the country of origin of ivory. Now, another group is reporting they've developed another tool, which is able to distinguish between legal and illegal sold ivory. The technique looks at the radioactive carbon in the ivory, which elephants-and every other living creature on earth-incorporated into their bodies in unusually high levels during the Cold War era. The carbon tells scientists whether a piece of ivory comes from an...