Does this mean all those Chinese buyers of poached rhinoceros horns for supposed virility are actually getting something if there's testosterone in there?
Rhino horns are modified hair and mammoth tusks are modified teeth so they are very different. But maybe there can be some testosterone in the rhino horns idk.
EDIT: It seems you are right, there is some testosterone in hair (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s002160050330) so probably there can be some amount in rhino horns. I don't know if eating it would have medical effects, for example maybe there's not enough or maybe it's not in the right form or maybe eating it doesn't work.
Probably not unless it was an incredibly high dose due to bio-availability [1] assuming you meant by eating it. There are ways to by-pass the first pass effect [2].
You know, sometimes I get mad at Chinese food fetishes killing off a species or another, then I remember American car fetish is destroying the human habitat...
I can't tell if it's just late in the day or if that's a really poorly written article across the board.
> Remarkably, this is the first time hormones have been seen in the extant or the extinct.
Later in the article they say they identified testosterone in modern elephants. Was this done _in response_ to finding it in mammoths? It's the only way the first part of this article makes sense.
> Given their close relation to Asian elephants, is it surprising that musth has been discovered?
Huh? This is the first mention of Asian elephants in this article. Have they had hormonal markers found in their tusks? If so, back to question #1.
> By contrast, they couldn’t test for female hormones to test “for pregnancy, for instance,” because they didn’t have a modern female elephant tusk to compare.
This is confusing. Is it because they're looking at Asian elephants (where the females do not have tusks) or because ... other reasons?
I realize this is a freelance article, but ... yikes.
Every time I read something on the news on a topic I have some knowledge about and see how off the mark they can be, I try to remind myself how much nonsense goes under my radar on topics I know little to nothing about.
