Animals don’t have to die for exotic leather products.
It is, however, perfectly legal to use tusks from extinct mammoths for making luxury wood carvings, chess figures or jewellery.
Since this type of ivory is mostly extracted from permafrost regions or near Polar seas, many elephants fall victim to the illegal ivory trade.
It is impossible to make out legal mammoth ivory with the naked eye, and current testing is destructive.
But a Bristol-based research team has shown that shining high-energy laser light on ivory specimens enables quick and undamaged identification under the microscope.
This could accelerate customs authorities’ enforcement actions and spare elephants’ lives as well.
The team’s method, Raman spectroscopy, can also help detect cancer in dogs.
