The woolly mammoth lived primarily in the mammoth steppe habitat, also called steppe tundra, which was an extensive cold and dry grassland ecosystem. This environment stretched across northern Eurasia and northern North America during the Pleistocene Ice Age. It included areas of present-day Siberia, Europe, and parts of North America such as Alaska and the Yukon. The habitat was composed of grasses, sedges, shrubs, and other tundra plants, rather than being dominated by ice and snow as commonly thought. Woolly mammoths adapted to this cold climate and were herbivores that fed on the vegetation in this steppe tundra. Some small populations of woolly mammoths survived in isolated areas like Wrangel Island off northern Russia and St. Paul Island in Alaska until about 4,000 to 5,600 years ago. Overall, their range covered a broad swath of the northern hemisphere's cold steppe and tundra landscapes during the last Ice Age.