2010-01-05T10:29:00.000-08:00

MAMMOTHS FIVE QUESTIONS

HOW BIG WERE THEY?

Jarkov, the mammoth discovered in Siberia, weight six tons and stood 11 ft. tall. Some mammoths reached 10 tons and 14 ft in height at the shoulder.

WHEN DID THEY LIVE?

Mammoths roamed the earth in large numbers from about 12 million to 9,000 years ago. Jarkov, a 47-year old male is thought to have died 20,380 years ago. The last holdouts died on wrangle island in the Bering Strait about 4,000 years ago at about the time Stonehenge and the pyramids were built.

WHERE DID THEY LIVE?

Mammoths first lived in Africa but eventually migrated to Europe and Siberia then crossed the land bridge to Alaska and roamed north and South America.

WHY DID THEY DIE OUT?

Theories fall into three categories: overkill, over-chill or over-ill (i.e., early human predation a quick change in climate or an as-yet-unknown virus)

ARE THEY EARLY ELEPHANTS?

No, but the two mammalian species probably shared a common ancestor.

WOOL GATHERING

Genardi Jarkov just wasn’t having any luck. In 1997 nine years old boy was looking for reindeer on the Siberian plain where his nomadic family had herded the beasts for generations. He didn’t find any reindeer that day, but as it turned out, Genardi didn’t go home empty handed either. After stumbling over what looked like a rock with hair growing out of it, he recognized an ivory tusk sticking up from the frozen ground. Knowing that full sized tusks could earn his clan thousands of dollars, Genardi led his family back to the site. They promptly sawed off both tusks and set about trying to sell them.

After a circuitous journey, the tusks eventually came to attention of French explorer Bernard Buigues who realized that they belonged to a woolly mammoth a massive, elephant-like species, most of whom died out roughly 10,000 years ago. Buigues hurried to the site and quickly determined that the best- preserved mammoth specimen ever found (even its hair was intact) was buried in the permafrost. Research showed the beast had frozen solid moments after it keeled over.

Hoping to keep Jarkov (as the beast was named) in pristine condition, Buigues and his team excavated a 23-ton cube of permafrost surrounding it and, in November 1999, flew it by helicopter to an ice cave more than 200 miles away, where they began painstakingly defrosting it with hair dryers (11/2 years later only 1% of Jarkov had been thawed out). While Jurassic park fans await news that the animal has been successfully cloned (a very long shot, at best),scientists are enjoying a windfall of less dramatic but more important developments, like the discovery of ancient pollen grains and now extinct insects caught in the beast’s hair-and blades of prehistoric grass wedged under its feet.

TUSKBUSTERS

Top left: a cache of some 100 mammoth tusks found on Siberia’s Taimyr Peninsula. Bottom left: Bernard Buigues dries out a swatch of hair in which ancient pollen (inset) was found. Bottom right: the huge cube of permafrost containing Jarkov was excavated; the tusks are a whimsical touch.

Great Discoveries