Woolly Mammoths



In 1977 a Russian bulldoze operator working in Siberia noticed a block of muddy ice containing a dark mass. On closer inspection he was amazed to see the contours of a small elephant-like creature. He had discovered a perfectly preserved Woolly Mammoth.

All over the frozen northern parts of Sibera and Canada we find the frozen carcasses of hundreds of thousands of large mammal species. These are mainly mammoths, but also wooly rhinos and other creatures of this kind. When their stomach contents are examined they have found to have been grazing on warm weather vegetation and yet they are found extremely close to the north pole.

The may be one of the theories that explains Crustal Displacement.


Scientist finds prehistoric 'zoo' in Siberian ice

March 6, 2000 - Times

Call of the wild: the mammoth and woolly rhino, whose roaming was depicted by prehistoric man, may make a comeback Scientists have located a frozen "zoo" of prehistoric creatures under the Siberian permafrost which they intend to retrieve for a cloning experiment.

Members of an expedition which last autumn airlifted a mammoth from its icy tomb now claim to have evidence of an extraordinary menagerie of extinct creatures.

Bernard Buigues, the French leader of the expedition, said he knew of another 18 locations which would yield the animals' bodies in a well-preserved state.

He is to begin the search for woolly rhino, steppe lions, giant deer, foxes and hardy breeds of horses from 20,000BC within the next month. He will cover an area extending 300 miles to the northwest and northeast of the Siberian town of Khatanga, 500 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

"Evidence from bones and tusks collected by nomads has alerted us to the location of the sites," said Buigues. He has travelled extensively in the Taymyr Peninsula in Siberia in the past 10 years, and believes he may also have found signs of human settlement from 2,000BC on the shores of Lake Taymyr.

Competition among rival teams of scientists has prompted veiled accusations of underhand tactics. There are suggestions that one group offered the nomads of the region villas on the Côte D'Azur in exchange for successful leads.

Associates of Buigues, whose film of the recovery of the first mammoth will be shown on the Discovery Channel on March 12, say his tactics for winning their co-operation are simple. "He carries a Polaroid camera everywhere to remind them who he is. Almost two-thirds of the 8,000 nomads in the region now have a picture of him together with them."

The prospect of discovering more animal remains in the ice has revived hopes of finding cells in sufficiently good condition to re-create some of the animal life of the Pleistocene era.

Larry Agenbroad, professor of geology at North Arizona University and one of the principal scientific advisers to the expedition, believes it may be possible in the long term to introduce the animals to North America.

Agenbroad, who has spent 30 years working with mammoth remains, said: "There is no significant difference between restoring prehistoric animals and restoring modern creatures such as grizzly bear and bison. Contrary to received opinion, hunting, not just climatic change, also played a part in the demise of the mammoth."

Rival Japanese researchers also have ambitions to emulate Jurassic Park with a sanctuary for the offspring of frozen mammoths and other extinct creatures.

Professor Akira Iritani, of Kinki University, hopes to find a suitable habitat for mammoths in a 100 sq mile wildlife reserve in the Russian republic of Yakutia, known as Pleistocene Park. It is currently home to Yakutian horses and Canadian bison.

This weekend Iritani said he believed mammoths would lumber across Siberia again within the next 20 years.

"We went to the park and looked at it by helicopter. It is fine in the summer, but we will have to provide some shelter for the mammoth in winter. We could easily get our hands on ancient horses and the ancestor of the Siberian tiger," he said.

He envisages releasing up to 40 mammoths in the park, and hopes to revive the species by cross-breeding with female elephants. He believes each generation will approach more closely the genetic inheritance of its forefathers as the females are impregnated with more DNA from the male mammoth.

The first step begins next month when a team of 25 scientists starts to thaw out the mammoth hacked out of the ground by Buigues.

Images taken with ground-penetrating radar underpin their hopes that the 21-ton block of ice and mud contains a complete mammoth. Previous finds have been lost because of flawed excavation methods.

But what if, against all hope, the block contains no more than bones and a few tufts of matted hair? Buigues insists the search will go on. "We are already planning for the next four years. There are many, many more carcasses in the ice."


Complete Mammoth found in Siberia

October 20, 1999 - By Nigel Hawkes, Science Editor - UK - Times Newspapers

The entire body of a woolly mammoth has been exhumed from the ice of Siberia, 23,000 years after it perished.

It was dug from a site on the Taimyr Peninsula on Sunday and flown by helicopter to the town of Khatanga, 150 miles away, a French member of the team responsible for the operation said yesterday.

Bernard Buigues said that the beast, named Zharkov in honour of the family that found it, was slung under the helicopter and flown to a cave dug in the permafrost at Khatanga, which replicates the dry and chilly conditions where it was found.

Exposure to warmer or more humid conditions could cause the remains to start decaying almost instantly.

The head of the mammal was taken from the body last year and is already in the cave, where scientists will carry out painstaking research, he said.

M Buigues said it was the first time that a mammoth had been recovered intact. Previously, the most exciting finds - also in Siberia - had been chunks of preserved flesh.

Two expeditions are in Siberia searching for mammoth remains: a Japanese-led team and the international expedition, called Mammuthus, of which M Buigues is a member and which also includes scientists from the United States, The Netherlands and Russia.

Both groups hope to extract cells from the preserved remains of mammoths and even use them to clone a new mammoth, using a female elephant as a surrogate mother.

But M Buigues played down any Jurassic Park-style reconstruction. "People often dream about resurrecting the mammoth using well preserved cells, but you have to be more modest," M Buigues said. "We don't expect to find red flesh, but rather a kind of dried meat."

Scientists hope that when the mammoth has been unwrapped from the icy soil that has preserved it, light will be shed on how the animals lived and why they died out, he said.

The woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, well-known from cave paintings, stood 13ft high, about the same as a full-grown African bull elephant.

The last mammoths died out as recently as 4,000 years ago, but there is still debate about why.

Some experts believe that they may have been the first species to be wiped out by man, given that mammoth bones and tusks have been disovered in the habitations of Cro-Magnon cave dwellers.

But these may have been taken from the bodies of dead mammoths, for no evidence has ever been found of mammoth traps or of traces of arrow or axe blows on the bones.

A more widely accepted explanation is that the mammoths died out because of malnutrition after climate change caused the dry vegetation that they ate to suffer a decline in nutritional quality.

Hair from the mammoth


NAU researcher's mammoth job

September 9, 1999- By Kerry Fehr-Snyder - The Arizona Republic

It roamed the Earth 23,000 years ago - only yesterday in geologic terms.

It was big -- 11 feet tall at the shoulder -- and burly -- about 8 tons. Now, with the help of a Northern Arizona University researcher, a full-grown woolly mammoth, complete with hair and skin, will be airlifted from northern Siberia for study.

And maybe for cloning.

"This is kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing for me," said NAU's Larry Agenbroad, who is headed to Siberia next week as the only U.S. scientist chosen for an international team of researchers.

Since 1966, Agenbroad has been hunting the extinct beast, which roamed during the Pleistocene era. He is director of the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, S.D., which primarily consists of fossils from the woolly mammoth's cousin, the Columbian mammoth.

But excavating -- even seeing, feeling and smelling -- a fully intact woolly mammoth is a dream come true.

"After looking at bones and every dropping we could find, I have the possibility of touching the wool and the skin and the flesh of this animal," he said.

"Even if that's all that's accomplished, it would be the frosting on the cake of my career."

The mammoth, a male estimated to have died in its 40s, was discovered in 1997 by tribesmen near the Taimyr Peninsula in northern Siberia. The tribe removed the mammoth's tusks, and its exposed head is decomposing slowly in the frigid temperatures.

But ground-penetrating radar determined that the rest of its body remains intact under the permanently frozen tundra.

A French explorer, Bernard Buigues, learned about the find last year and decided to lead a nine-member invitation-only team to exhume and analyze the mammoth.

Buigues reportedly became especially excited after he trained a hair dryer on the animal's head and its smell -- as best he could determine -- came flooding back.

"He's not a biologist, but he said he entered another world where you could smell the animal, the wool, the earth," Agenbroad said.

Buigues convinced the Discovery Channel to pay for and film the three-month expedition. The cable station plans to air a two-hour special called Raising the Mammoth on March 15.

David Merrill, a spokesman for the Discovery Channel, said the expedition's cost will be justified regardless of whether scientists are able to exhume the mammoth.

"We believe it's perfectly preserved and that's amazing," he said.

Agenbroad's colleagues tend to agree.

"A frozen mammoth in Siberia," Paul Martin, an University of Arizona mammoth expert, said wistfully. "Nothing like that's happened since that baby mammoth was found by the Russians during the Cold War."

And the addition of a complete woolly mammoth to zoology's library of specimens would be priceless, Martin said.

Logistically, the team's task will be a challenge.

During the excavation, the team will build a special refrigerated structure above the site to maintain the frozen temperatures below. Once the animal, still encased in ice and tundra, is exhumed, it will be airlifted by the largest helicopter in Russia to frozen caves in Khatanga, about 217 miles away.

The scientists want to keep the animal as well-frozen as possible in hopes of preserving its organs and tissues.

Agenbroad's teaching schedule allows him only two weeks away from NAU for the expedition. His primary role will be in freeing the animal and transporting it.

Over time, he hopes to look at the geologic and ecological environment in which the mammoth lived by studying the contents of its stomach and the botanical remains on its coat and in the dirt.

By analyzing the geologic conditions, Agenbroad may be able to determine how the animal lived and died.

Agenbroad also hopes to compare the diet of the woolly mammoth, which primarily lived in subarctic regions, to the hairless Columbian mammoth of North America.

Most of all, he's just looking forward to being there.

"This is the closest I'll get to probably touching and seeing the animal, or the kissing cousin of the animal, that I've been pursuing all my life."



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