USING CARBON 14 TO DETERMINE THE AGE OF ILLEGAL IVORY: And DNA to help determine where the elephant lived. Chemical analysis indicates poachers produce most of the illegal ivory on the market. A number of people thought crooked governments were selling from old ivory stocks.

Thure Cerling at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and his colleagues measured the decay of carbon-14 isotopes in 231 ivory tusks, confiscated between 2002 and 2014, to determine when the elephants they were taken from had died…By combining their measurements with earlier analysis of the tusks’ DNA, the researchers were able to tell where the poached elephants had lived.

The carbon-14 sleuthing

“…puts to rest a speculation which has been at the back of everyone’s mind,” says George Wittemyer, a conservation ecologist and elephant specialist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Some had wondered whether corrupt governments were contributing to the ivory trade by selling off old ivory, bit by bit, from stockpiles built up over years.”