History of Mammoth Discoveries (continued...)
The next major mammoth find occurred in Russia at the turn of the 20th century, when a Siberian deer hunter spotted mammoth tusks protruding from an icy cliff along the Bereskovka River, inside the Arctic Circle. The hunter was satisfied with taking the tusks and selling them, but fortunately, the buyer decided to inform the Russian government, which in 1901 sent zoologist Otto Herz and taxidermist Eugen Pfizenmayer from the Imperial Academy of Sciences to investigate. After an arduous four-month journey to the spot, the two scientists were struck with awe by what they found.
“Some time before the mammoth body came into view, I smelt its anything but pleasant odor—like the smell of a badly kept stable heavily blended with that of offal,” Pfizenmayer later recounted. “Then, around a bend in the path, a towering skull appeared, and we stood at the grave of the diluvial monster… speechless in front of this evidence of the prehistoric world, which had been preserved almost intact in its grave of ice throughout the ages.” The 35- to 50-year old male, which had fallen into an ice fissure and suffocated in a subsequent landslide 35,000 years ago, was so well-preserved that its flesh—dark red and streaked with thick layers of marbled fat—looked like freshly frozen beef or horsemeat. “It looked so appetizing that we wondered for some time whether we should not taste it,” Herz later recalled. “But no one would venture to take it into his mouth.”
Several other mammoths were discovered in Siberia during the 20th century. In 1948, geologists discovered another adult male, aged about 50-55 and dead for 13,500 years, buried in permafrosted soil in the Taimyr Peninsula. The scientists recovered a nearly complete skeleton, in addition to some soft tissue, skin and hair, and the specimen became the standard of comparison for the woolly mammoth species. Another mammoth, discovered in 1972 on the bank of the Shandrin River, was even more valuable to scientists. The animal, which had been dead for at least 45,000 years, was so well-preserved that scientists were able for the first time to reconstruct a mammoth’s abdominal organs, including the spleen, pancreas, kidneys and intestines.
In 1977, gold miners hosing down the permafrost along a creek uncovered a six- to twelve-month old male mammoth calf, dead at least 40,000 years, that still had the remnants of plants it had eaten in its colon. Dima, as the mammoth was named by scientists, has since been exhibited in Europe, North America and Japan. In 1999, a French expedition carved out a 23-ton chunk of frozen Siberian permafrost containing a mammoth and used a helicopter to airlift it to the town of Khatanga, where scientists began slowly and painstakingly thawing it with hair dryers.
In recent years, scientific advances—such as the development of DNA analysis and imaging technology—have allowed researchers to glean more and more knowledge from mammoth remains, rather than merely turning them over to taxidermists. In the case of Lyuba the woolly mammoth calf, for example, scientists at the Zoological Institute in St. Petersburg shipped the carcass to Tokyo’s Jikei University School of Medicine, where CT scans produced three-dimensional pictures of the mammoth’s intact heart, liver and other organs—the first time that the internal structure of an extinct animal had ever been observed. The scans told researchers that Lyuba’s diet still consisted of mother’s milk, just like young elephants her age. They also showed a lack of skeletal injuries, and a significant amount of sediment in the baby female’s trunk and mouth. That suggests that Lyuba’s short life wasn’t ended by a predator. Instead, the calf probably took a wrong step on a riverbank and either choked on the mud or drowned. The oxygen-deprived environment helped preserve its carcass for thousands of years, until it could yield its secrets to us.
