The Adams mammoth also known as the Lenskymammoth is the first woolly mammoth skeleton with skin and flesh still attached to be recovered by scientists. The mostly complete skeleton and flesh were discovered in 1799 in the northeastern Arctic Siberia peninsula Mys Bykov (near Bykovsky, Sakha Republic, Russia) on delta Lena river by Ossip Shumachov, an Evenki hunter [1] and subsequently recovered in 1806 when Russian botanist Mikhail Adams journeyed to the location and collected the remains.
The first published reports of Siberian mammoth remains appeared in Europe in the 1690s. [2] In 1728, Sir Hans Sloane published what can be considered the first comprehensive scientific paper on mammoths in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. [3] Sloane's paper was based on travellers' descriptions and a few scattered bones collected in Siberia and Britain. While he discussed the question of whether or not the mammoth was an elephant, he drew no conclusions. In 1738, Johann Philipp Breyne argued that mammoth fossils represented some kind of elephant, but could not explain why a tropical animal would be found in such a cold area as Siberia; he suggested that they might have been transported there by Noah's flood. [4] Between 1692 and 1806, only four descriptions of frozen mammoths—skeletons with skin and flesh still attached—had been published in Europe. [5] None of the remains of those five were recovered and no complete skeleton recovered during that time. By the end of the century, based on this partial data, Georges Cuvier was able to argue conclusively that the Siberian mammoth was a different species than either of the two known species of elephant. [6] This was the state of affairs when Adams heard about Shumachov's discovery.
Adams had come to Siberia in 1805 as part a scientific team attached to Count Yury Golovkin's unsuccessful diplomatic mission to China. [6] After the failure of the mission, several members of the scientific team stayed on in Siberia to conduct research. While in Yakutsk at the beginning of the summer of 1806, Adams heard from an ivory merchant about the frozen mammoth discovered near the Lena Delta. He hired four Cossacks and sailed down the Lena to its delta on the Arctic Ocean. At the end of June, he arrived in Shumachov's village and, at the end of July, Adams, Scumachov, and ten men from Shumachov's village journeyed to the mammoth's location. [7]
At first, Adams was disappointed to discover that wild animals had eaten most of the organs and flesh of the mammoth (including the trunk). However, he forgot his disappointment after examining the carcass and realizing that what was left would still be, by far, the most complete mammoth ever recovered. All in all, Adams recovered the entire skeleton, minus the tusks, which Shumachov had already sold, and one foreleg; most of the skin, which he described as "of such an extraordinary weight, that ten persons ... moved it with great difficulty;" and nearly forty pounds of hair. During his return voyage he purchased a pair of tusks that he believed were the same tusks that Shumachov had sold.
In St. Petersburg, the task of reassembling the skeleton was given to Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius. Tilesius' task was made easier by the fact that the Kunstkamera, the museum established by Peter the Great, contained the skeleton of an Indian elephant that Tilesius was able to use as a reference. Tilesius had wooden replicas made to replace the missing leg bones. [8] His reconstruction was one of the first attempts at reconstructing the skeleton of an extinct animal. [9] While most of the reconstruction is correct, Tilesius made a glaring error by mounting the tusks on the wrong sides so that they curved outward instead of inward. The error was not corrected until 1899 [10] and the correct placement of mammoth's tusks would still be a matter of debate into the twentieth century. [11]
Adams' account of his journey was published in late 1807 and soon translated into other European languages and circulated throughout Europe and the Americas. Tilesius made a set of etchings of his reconstruction and sent them other naturalists to examine [12] while he worked on a detailed report of the skeleton which was finally published in 1815. [8]
A mammoth is any species of the extinct elephantid genus Mammuthus. They lived from the late Miocene epoch into the Holocene until about 4,000 years ago, with mammoth species at various times inhabiting Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Mammoths are distinguished from living elephants by their spirally twisted tusks and in at least some later species, the development of numerous adaptions to living in cold environments, including a thick layer of fur.
A mastodon is a member of the genus Mammut, which was endemic to North America and lived from the late Miocene to the early Holocene. Mastodons belong to the order Proboscidea, the same order as elephants and mammoths. Mammut is the type genus of the extinct family Mammutidae, which diverged from the ancestors of modern elephants at least 27–25 million years ago, during the Oligocene.
Elephantidae is a family of large, herbivorous proboscidean mammals collectively called elephants and mammoths. These are large terrestrial mammals with a snout modified into a trunk and teeth modified into tusks. Most genera and species in the family are extinct. Only two genera, Loxodonta and Elephas, are living.
The New Siberian Islands are an archipelago in the Extreme North of Russia, to the north of the East Siberian coast between the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea north of the Sakha (Yakutia) Republic, of which they are administratively a part.
New Siberia or Novaya Sibir is the easternmost of the Anzhu Islands, the northern subgroup of the New Siberian Islands lying between the Laptev Sea and East Siberian Sea. Its area of approximately 6,200 square kilometres places it the 102nd largest islands in the world. New Siberia Island is low lying, rising to only 76 metres and covered with tundra vegetation. The island is a part of the territory of Russia's Sakha Republic.
Johann Friedrich Adam, later called Michael Friedrich Adams, and also Johannes Michael Friedrich Adams in full citation of botany discoveries was a botanist from St. Petersburg, Russian Empire.
The pygmy mammoth or Channel Islands mammoth is an extinct species of dwarf mammoth native to the northern Channel Islands off the coast of southern California during the Late Pleistocene. It was descended from the Columbian mammoth of mainland North America, which are suggested to have colonised the islands around 250–150,000 years ago. At only 1.72–2.02 m (5.6–6.6 ft) tall at the shoulder, it was around 17% the size of its mainland ancestor. The species became extinct around 13,000 years ago, co-inciding with major environmental change and the arrival of humans in the Channel islands.
The Columbian mammoth is an extinct species of mammoth that inhabited North America from southern Canada to Costa Rica during the Pleistocene epoch. The Columbian mammoth descended from Eurasian steppe mammoths that colonised North America during the Early Pleistocene around 1.5–1.3 million years ago, and later experienced hybridisation with the woolly mammoth lineage. The Columbian mammoth was among the last mammoth species, and the pygmy mammoths evolved from them on the Channel Islands of California. The closest extant relative of the Columbian and other mammoths is the Asian elephant.
Johann Philipp Breyne FRS, son of Jacob Breyne (1637–1697), was a German-Polish botanist, palaeontologist, zoologist and entomologist. He is best known for his work on the Polish cochineal, an insect formerly used in production of red dye. Proposed by Hans Sloane, he was elected, on 21 April 1703, a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was also a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Societas Litteraria
The woolly mammoth is an extinct species of mammoth that lived from the Middle Pleistocene until its extinction in the Holocene epoch. It was one of the last in a line of mammoth species, beginning with the African Mammuthus subplanifrons in the early Pliocene. The woolly mammoth began to diverge from the steppe mammoth about 800,000 years ago in Siberia. Its closest extant relative is the Asian elephant. The Columbian mammoth lived alongside the woolly mammoth in North America, and DNA studies show that the two hybridised with each other. Mammoth remains had long been known in Asia before they became known to Europeans. The origin of these remains was long a matter of debate and often explained as being remains of legendary creatures. The mammoth was identified as an extinct species of elephant by Georges Cuvier in 1796.
Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt was an ethnic German physician, naturalist and geographer who lived in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and later in the Russian Empire. He was among the first to conduct a scientific exploration of Siberia, which led to the unearthing of the first fossil mammoth.
The Jarkov Mammoth, is a woolly mammoth specimen discovered on the Taymyr Peninsula of Siberia by a nine-year-old boy in 1997. This particular mammoth is estimated to have lived about 20,000 years ago. It is likely to be male and probably died at age 47.
Patrick Blair FRS (ca.1670–1728) was a Scottish surgeon, anatomist and botanist, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
The Gray's Inn Lane Hand Axe is a pointed flint hand axe, found buried in gravel under Gray's Inn Lane, London, England, by pioneering archaeologist John Conyers in 1679, and now in the British Museum. The hand axe is a fine example from about 350,000 years ago, in the Lower Paleolithic period, but its main significance lies in the role it and the circumstances of its excavation played in the emerging understanding of early human history.
Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius von Tilenau was a German naturalist and explorer, physician, draftsman and engraver. He was a member of the Order of St. Vladimir and of the Legion of Honour.
Paleontology in Kentucky refers to paleontological research occurring within or conducted by people from the U.S. state of Kentucky.
The Yukagir Mammoth is a frozen adult male woolly mammoth specimen found in the autumn of 2002 in northern Yakutia, Arctic Siberia, Russia, and is considered to be an exceptional discovery. The nickname refers to the Siberian village near where it was found.
The Dundee Elephant was an unnamed female Indian elephant, which died on the road between Broughty Ferry and Dundee on 27 April 1706. The elephant was subsequently dissected and described by the Dundee apothecary-surgeon Patrick Blair who published his findings in the Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1710. This was the first time that a complete elephant had been subjected to scientific anatomical study in Western Europe.
The research history of Mammut is extensive given its complicated taxonomic and non-taxonomic histories, with the earliest recorded fossil finds dating back to 1705 in Claverack, New York during the colonial era of what is now the United States of America. Initially thought to belong to biblical antediluvian giants, the fossils were later determined to belong to a proboscidean species as a result of more complete 18th century finds from the locality of Big Bone Lick in what is now Kentucky. The molars were studied by European and American naturalists, who were generally baffled on its lack of analogue to modern elephants, leading to varying hypothesis on the affinities of the teeth. More complete skeletons were found after the independence of the United States colonies from Great Britain within the early 19th century. American historians of the 21st century have made arguments that the early history of M. americanum finds and studies played major roles in shaping American nationalism on the basis of the large sizes and relative completeness of the fossils to disprove the negative theory of social degeneracy in North America.