Although variable, they typically appear as woolly or hairy areas on the stems from which spines emerge.
In all these areas, the woolly language of arts policy tends to hide the fact that many of these (sometimes expensive) projects are not proven to work.
In a nation where the basic arguments are always in black and white, and the grey area, too complicated and woolly, is to be avoided, knee-jerk reactions to something as simple as a single, unqualified word are commonplace.
The Russian researchers excavated ancient squirrel burrows exposed on the bank of the lower Kolyma River, an area thronged with mammoth and woolly rhinoceroses during the last ice age.
Paleontologists believe that mastodons, as well as saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths, were quite common in this area during the last ice age, about 18,000 years ago, but the reddish-brown elephantlike behemoths abruptly disappeared several thousand years later.
"It's the end of the road, whether symbolically or literally," said Paul Schurke, an Arctic explorer, calling the area a "true wild and woolly wilderness that's still quite accessible".
The images, he adds, also revealed several other shapes over a wider area that appear to be woolly rhinos and other large Ice Age animals.
"There is no magic test, which makes it sound awfully woolly but that's like many other areas of medicine.
The woolly mammoth may have entered these southern areas during times when Columbian mammoth populations were absent.
Due to the large area of Siberia, it cannot be completely ruled out that woolly mammoths survived into more recent times, but all evidence indicates that they went extinct thousands of years ago.
