Yukagir mammoth

Main article: Woolly mammoth

The Yukagir Mammoth was found in autumn of 2002 and is an exceptional discovery that took place in northern Yakutia, Arctic Siberia, Russia:[1] an immense and little known territory of Siberia and the largest sub-national governing body by area in the world, notorious for being the ancestral grounds of the mammoths and its inhabitants.[2]

Discovery

The head of the woolly mammoth, entirely covered with skin and very well-preserved, was first discovered in 2002. After hearing about the discovery, a polar explorer carried out the expedition with his team to extract the remains from the permafrost. One of the members of the team was the French polar explorer - Bernard Buigues - famous for carrying out expeditions to the North Pole, Siberia since the 1990's and is a proclaimed "Mammoth-Hunter".[1] It took three excavation trips to gather and put the Yukagir fossil together. Although mammoth fossils are not a rarity around the world, few are as spectacular as this specimen from Northern Yakutia.[3]

The discovery of the Yukagir Mammoth - a nickname for the male frozen adult of the woolly mammoth specimen - is one of the greatest paleontological discoveries of all times as it revealed that woolly mammoths had temporal glands between the ear and the eye[1] and the well-preserved remains of the adult male Yukagir Mammoth, such as the foot, shows that the soles of the feet contained many cracks that would have helped in gripping surfaces during locomotion. Like modern elephants, woolly mammoths walked on their toes and had large, fleshy pads behind the toes . Among other discoveries, the Yukagir Mammoth showed that the species had suffered from spondylitis in two vertebrae, and osteomyelitis is also known from some specimens. Several specimens have healed bone fractures, showing that the animals had survived these injuries.[4]

The Yukagir Mammoth head

The woolly mammoth's permafrost tomb preserved its head, tusks, front legs, and parts of its stomach and intestinal tract. From its bones and enormous tusks, the scientists who rushed to the site (including mammoth experts Dick Mol and Larry Agenbroad) guessed that the woolly mammoth was an old male that when alive stood over nine feet tall at the shoulder and weighed four to five tons. Furthermore, scientists were able to discover that the main component of the Yukagir's final meal was grass, including stems from the Poaceae family. Remarkably, like many of the dung's floral remains, the stems have retained their color and shape ever since the woolly mammoth tore them from the tundra roughly 22,500 years ago.[5] Based on the Yukagir Mammoth's last meal, scientists were enabled to discover facts about the elephant's ancestors and conduct an environmental reconstruction[6] and fungi's importance in the process of nutrient cycling in the mammoth steppe.[7]

The following types of research were agreed upon at the meeting of the Scientific Council:[8]

Exhibitions

Since the Yukagir Mammoth has been found, it has been transported globally for informative and educational purposes. The Yukagir Mammoth was displayed in an effort to understand the link between life and the global environment with the theme of the Expo - "Nature's Wisdom." To keep the Mammoth preserved, the exhibition room needed to be kept at -15 °C. The 2005 World Expo was held in Aichi, Japan at took place on November 17–18, 2005.[9]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Mol, Dick; Shoshani, Jeheskel (Hezy); Tikhonov, Aleksei; GEEL, Bas van; Lazarev, Peter; Boeskorov, Gennady; Agenbroad, Larry (2006). "The Yukagir Mammoth: Brief History, 14c dates, individual age, gender, size, physical and environmental conditions and storage." (PDF). Scientific Annals, School of Geology Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH) 98: 299–314. Retrieved 2014-06-12.
  2. ↑ Bolot, Bochkarev. "eYakutia". http://eyakutia.com/tag/yukagir-mammoth/. Retrieved 2014-06-12. External link in |website= (help)
  3. ↑ Anonymous. "From the Siberian steppes to the Aichi Universal Exhibition in 2005". http://mammuthus.org/yukagir-2003/. Mammuthus.org. External link in |website= (help);
  4. ↑ Lister, Adrian (2007). Mammoths - Giants of the Ice Age. London: Frances Lincoln. pp. 108–111. ISBN 978-0-520-26160-0.
  5. ↑ Tyson, Peter. "A Mammoth Waste of Time". http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/0306/03-mamm-02.html. Nova Science Now. Retrieved 12 June 2014. External link in |website= (help)
  6. ↑ van Geel, B.; Aptroot, A.; Baittinger, D.; Mol, D.; Pals, J.P.; Shoshani, J.; van Reenen, G.B.A.; Bull, I.; Evershed, R.; Nierop, K.G.J.; Tikhonov, A.; van Tienderen, P.H. (2005). "Environmental reconstruction based on the Yukagir Mammoth's last meal". Japan Association for the 2005 World Exposition: 13–14.
  7. ↑ Aptroot, Andre; van Geel, Bas (2006). "Fungi of the colon of the Yukagir Mammoth and from stratigraphically related permafrost samples". Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology 141 (1-2): 225–230. doi:10.1016/j.revpalbo.2005.04.006.
  8. ↑ Anonymous. "Survey of the Discovery Site of the Yukagir Mammoth (June)". http://www.expo2005.or.jp/en/mammoth/040621_mammoth.html. Japan Association for the 2005 World Exposition. External link in |website= (help);
  9. ↑ Anonymous. "FOAM USED IN THE PRESERVATION OF THE YUKAGIR MAMMOTH". http://www.fomo.com/news/mammoth.aspx?print=true. External link in |website= (help);

See also

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