Grant Zazula, right, studies a massive woolly mammoth skull that was unearthed in June by a mining crew in central Yukon. Zazula has sent mammoth tusk and bone samples to scientists in Canada and Europe for use in medical and food research. (Grant Zazula/Government of Yukon)Scientists are hoping ancient woolly mammoth tusks and bones from Yukon will help their modern-day research, from finding a cure for osteoporosis to cracking down on mislabelled food products.

Some mammoth ivory is under the microscope of Stephen Sims, a University of Western Ontario physiology professor who hopes the ancient ivory can help make a breakthrough in modern human bone diseases.

"We're optimistic that we're going to be able to use ancient mammoth tusks to carry out modern medical research," Sims told CBC News.

The researcher has received a sample of tusk from Grant Zazula, a Yukon government paleontologist who has unearthed a number of woolly mammoth remains over the years.

"To be able to work with a lab like this that's trying to find the cure for osteoporosis or rheumatory arthritis, that's amazing," Zazula said.

"There's no way, as a paleontologist, that I would have ever foreseen this sort of application."

Transparent cells

Sims said he will chip off tiny slices from the tusk sample — about half the width of a hair — to see how transparent the ivory cells can really be.

Sims said ivory becomes more transparent as it ages, so it should be easier to study the cells in woolly mammoth ivory in ways that can't be done with modern bones.

"We think that the mammoth tusk is going to enable us to view osteoclasts in ways that have never been done before," he said.

Osteoclasts are cells that contribute to the deterioration of bones in diseases such as osteoporosis and rheumatoid arthritis.

Simms said he got the idea when he heard Zazula speak on CBC Radio's The Current program about his study of the fossils of ancient wooly mammoths, which are upwards of 30,000 years old.

Zazula had been interviewed in October about a proposal to trade woolly mammoth tusks as an alternative to elephant ivory.

"In the Yukon, there's a large supply of ivory here," Zazula said. "It comes out of the placer gold mines all the time and it's really well preserved."

Food fraud research

Meanwhile, some researchers in Europe are trying out Yukon woolly mammoth bones to see if they can accurately identify meat that has been adulterated with other substances.

This undated handout provided by ExhibitEase LLC shows a 3D computer generated Image of woolly mammoth emerging from an ice block. (Steven W. Marcus/Associated Press)

Scientists there are trying to curb the prevalence of "food fraud," in which meat and other food products are misrepresented with improper labelling or even injected with other proteins.

"The important part of this mammoth bone is that nobody eats mammoths today," said Zazula, who has sent some woolly mammoth bone samples to Europe.

Because woolly mammoth is one thing that will never be found in modern lunch meat, it can be used as a yardstick to measure meat contamination.

"We were thinking, what could we give them which is going to behave the same, is chemically very similar but is something they're never going to find as a contaminant in chicken?" said Matthew Collins, an archeology professor at the University of York in the United Kingdom.

"We can extract the same gelatin protein from the mammoth bone, [so] we can use that as a standard for the labs."

Six laboratories are currently using mammoth to verify their technique. If it works, their methods could be adopted by other labs around the world.

"It's amazing that something that starts off as a paleontological question can have real-world applications and help us solve real-world problems," Zazula said.