History of Mammoth Discoveries (continued...)
The elephant theory wasn’t completely off-base; DNA analysis would eventually reveal that mammoths were in fact related to modern elephants. But in the late 1790s, French paleontologist Georges Cuvier compared the skeletons of Indian and African elephants to fossils found in Europe and Siberia. Cuvier concluded that the European and Siberian bones belonged to a distinctly different sort of animal.
Not long afterward, Cuvier’s published findings were substantiated—quite literally—by another discovery. In the early 1800s, a Siberian fisherman named Ossip Shumakhov discovered a piece of thawing ice that appeared to have an animal inside. Disregarding local lore that such a discovery was bad luck, Shumakhov hacked off the tusks from the carcass and bartered them for 50 rubles’ worth of goods in a nearby town. A few years later, a Scottish botanist named Michael Adams, who was working with the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, heard about Shumakhov’s mammoth and hurried to the spot.
By then, wild animals and villagers in search of food for their dogs had carved away most of the mammoth’s flesh, but they had left behind the skeleton and the hide, still covered with reddish wool and black hairs. Adams also found the mammoth’s dried-up brain, still encased in its skull. He hauled the remains by sledge and train back to St. Petersburg, where in 1808 the skeleton was reassembled, with the few missing bones replaced by plaster and wood copies. For the first time, scientists had some idea of how a mammoth actually looked.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, an amateur naturalist, was fascinated with mammoths. When a mammoth femur, tusks and teeth were unearthed on a farm in upstate New York in 1799, Jefferson, who at the time was still Vice President, had unsuccessfully tried to buy the remains. (The winning bid came from Jefferson’s American Philosophical Society colleague Charles Willson Peale, who got the bones for $200 plus a new gun for the farmer’s son and gowns for his wife and daughters.) Jefferson was also intrigued by the discovery of elephant-like bones at Big Bone Lick in Kentucky by Dr. William Goforth. In 1803, he dispatched Meriwether Lewis to the site to examine Goforth’s find, and Lewis dutifully sent him back a detailed report. “The tusks of the Mammoth were conical, much Curved, and also spiral or twisted,” he wrote.
Jefferson, like many others of his time, had not yet accepted the still-new concept of extinction, and when he sent Lewis and William Clark to explore the Louisiana Purchase lands in 1804, he harbored the hope that they might possibly find living mammoths. After they returned without one, Jefferson had to be content with some old bones that Clark collected for him in Kentucky in 1807.
