Mammoth 'could be reborn in four years'

Mammoth 'could be reborn in four years'

The woolly mammoth, extinct for thousands of years, could be brought back to life in as little as four years thanks to a breakthrough in cloning technology.

By Julian Ryall
 

Previous efforts in the 1990s to recover nuclei in cells from the skin and muscle tissue from mammoths found in the Siberian permafrost failed because they had been too badly damaged by the extreme cold.

But a technique pioneered in 2008 by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology, was successful in cloning a mouse from the cells of another mouse that had been frozen for 16 years.

Now that hurdle has been overcome, Akira Iritani, a professor at Kyoto University, is reactivating his campaign to resurrect the species that died out 5,000 years ago.

"Now the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth," he told The Daily Telegraph.He intends to use Dr Wakayama's technique to identify the nuclei of viable mammoth cells before extracting the healthy ones.

The nuclei will then be inserted into the egg cells of an African elephant, which will act as the surrogate mother for the mammoth. Professor Iritani said he estimates that another two years will be needed before the elephant can be impregnated, followed by the approximately 600-day gestation period.

He has announced plans to travel to Siberia in the summer to search for mammoths in the permafrost and to recover a sample of skin or tissue that can be as small as 3cm square. If he is unsuccessful, the professor said, he will ask Russian scientists to provide a sample from one of their finds.

"The success rate in the cloning of cattle was poor until recently but now stands at about 30 per cent," he said. "I think we have a reasonable chance of success and a healthy mammoth could be born in four or five years."

 

Russian boy discovers 'woolly mammoth of the century'

 

An 11-year-old boy from a nomadic family in Russia's north has discovered a well-preserved woolly mammoth, in what scientists describe as the best such discovery since 1901.

 

Woolly mammoth Photo: AFP

Yevgeny Salinder, whose family lives near a polar station in the northern Taymyr Peninsula, discovered the frozen prehistoric animal when he was walking along the banks of the Yenisei River in late August.

"He sensed an unpleasant odour and saw something sticking out of the ground – it was the mammoth's heels," said Alexei Tikhonov, director of the St Petersburg-based Zoological Museum, who rushed to the tundra after the boy's family notified scientists of the historic find.

Mr Tikhonov said it was the best preserved adult mammoth discovered in more than 100 years.

"So far we can say it is the mammoth of the century," he said.

"An employee of the International Mammoth Committee and me went to the site. Judging by its legs, it turned out to be quite a large mammoth, it was lying on its right side at the height of 5 metres (15 feet) above sea level. We had to start the excavation as soon as possible and there were just the two of us."

Joined by employees of the nearby Sopkarga polar station, the scientists spent five days digging out the animal.  Mr Tikhonov said the mammoth had died aged 15-16 around 30,000 years ago, adding that the tusk, skin, an eye and an ear were clearly visible.

"Its one-metre-long penis is also intact so we can conclude that this was a male," Mr Tikhonov said, adding it also had one 1.5-metre-long tusk.

"Its skeleton is virtually intact and its heart in the rib cage may be intact, too."

The precious find weighing nearly one tonne was transported to the northern city of Dudinka and will later be brought to St Petersburg and Moscow where scientists can study it. Mr Tikhonov said that geneticists might be interested in trying to clone the animal, dubbed Zhenya after the nickname of the boy who discovered it, but he suggested that this would be difficult.

Global warming has thawed ground in northern Russia that is usually almost permanently frozen, leading to the discoveries of a number of mammoth remains.

South Korean and Russian scientists bid to clone mammoth

 

Russian and South Korean scientists signed a deal earlier this year on joint research intended to recreate a woolly mammoth, an animal which last walked the earth some 10,000 years ago.

 

South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk (L) shakes hands with Vasily Vasiliev, vice director of North-Eastern Federal University of Russia's Sakha Republic 

Photo: AFP/Getty Images

The deal was signed by Vasily Vasiliev, vice rector of North-Eastern Federal University of the Sakha Republic, and controversial cloning pioneer Hwang Woo-Suk of South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation.

Hwang was a national hero until some of his research into creating human stem cells was found in 2006 to have been faked. But his work in creating Snuppy, the world's first cloned dog, in 2005, has been verified by experts.

Stem cell scientists are now setting their sights on the extinct woolly mammoth, after global warming thawed Siberia's permafrost and uncovered remains of the animal.

Sooam said it would launch research this year if the Russian university can ship the remains. The Beijing Genomics Institute will also take part in the project.

The South Korean foundation said it would transfer technology to the Russian university, which has already been involved in joint research with Japanese scientists to bring a mammoth back to life.

"The first and hardest mission is to restore mammoth cells," another Sooam researcher, Hwang In-Sung, told AFP. His colleagues would join Russian scientists in trying to find well-preserved tissue with an undamaged gene.

By replacing the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant with those taken from the mammoth's somatic cells, embryos with mammoth DNA could be produced and planted into elephant wombs for delivery, he said. Sooam will use an Indian elephant for its somatic cell nucleus transfer. The somatic cells are body cells, such as those of internal organs, skin, bones and blood.

"This will be a really tough job, but we believe it is possible because our institute is good at cloning animals," Hwang In-Sung said.

South Korean experts have previously cloned animals including a cow, a cat, dogs, a pig and a wolf.

Last October Hwang Woo-Suk unveiled eight cloned coyotes in a project sponsored by a provincial government.



Source: AFP via The Telegraph @ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8257223/Mammoth-could-be-reborn-in-four-years.html & http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/9590626/Russian-boy-discovers-woolly-mammoth-of-the-century.html & http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/9139976/South-Korean-and-Russian-scientists-bid-to-clone-mammoth.html



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Resurrecting the Mammoth

Resurrecting the Mammoth

Competing teams intend to bring back the woolly mammoth

Will the woolly mammoth be lumbering back? Japanese scientists 'to resurrect extinct giant from frozen DNA within five years'

By Fiona Macrae

It died out around 8,000 years ago… but in just five years the woolly mammoth could soon be walking the Earth again.

Japanese scientists are behind an ambitious project to bring the long-extinct mammal back from the dead.

The revival requires a sample of intact DNA for cloning purposes and an elephant to act as surrogate mother, donating an egg and her womb.

Coming back to life: This ancient mammoth, extinct 8,000 years ago, will be revived in the next five years through cloning

Taking into account the 600 or so days needed for the pregnancy, the first baby mammoths of the modern age could be born in four to five years.

In recent years, scientists have used samples of hair frozen in the Siberian ice for thousands of years to piece together the mammoth’s genetic code. And DNA preserved in bone has been used to recreate the prehistoric giant’s blood.

But the latest project is far more ambitious.

The Kyoto University researchers are planning an expedition to the Siberian permafrost this summer in search of a flash-frozen specimen still rich in DNA.

Other options include taking a sample of skin or tissue from a carcass already in a research collection, Japanese newpaper Yomiuri Shimbun reports.

DNA from the mammoth's cells will be injected into an empty egg, taken from an elephant, its closest living relative

A sample just over an inch square could provide all the genetic information needed.

DNA from the mammoth’s cells will be injected into an empty egg, taken from an elephant, its closest living relative.

The egg is then zapped with electricity to trick it into growing and dividing, like a normal embryo. It will then be allowed to mature in the lab for a few days, before being inserted into the womb of an elephant that will act as a surrogate mother, in the hope that she will eventually give birth to a baby mammoth.

The project will build on the success of other Japanese scientists who two years ago created clones of a mouse that had been dead and frozen for 16 years.

Study of the baby mammoth may shed light on why the huge creatures that once strode in large herds across Eurasia and North America died out 8,000 years ago

But it will not be plain sailing, with the intricate process fraught with the possibilities of failure, miscarriage and animal suffering.

Project leader: Professor Akira Iritani

When resurrecting the mouse, more than 1,100 attempts produced just seven healthy clones.

Even if the scientists are successful, the problems don’t end with the birth. Project leader Professor Akira Iritani said: ‘If a cloned embryo can be created, we need to discuss, before transplanting it into the womb, how to breed (the mammoth) and whether to display it to the public.’

Study of the baby mammoth may shed light on why the huge creatures that once strode in large herds across Eurasia and North America died out 8,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age.

Some experts hold that mammoths were hunted to extinction by the species that was to become the planet’s dominant predator – humans.

Others argue that climate change was more to blame, leaving a species adapted for frozen climes ill-equipped to cope with a warming world.

Cloning dinosaurs would be a much more complex task, because their DNA would be at least 65million years old and likely to have broken down.

from The Daily mail @  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1348000/Woolly-mammoth-Japanese-scientists-resurrect-extinct-giant-fozen-DNA.html#ixzz1pqAKsyvm

 Controversial scientist plans to clone a mammoth

 

South Korean Hwang Woo Suk was long regarded as a cloning pioneer - until he was charged with having faked much of his stem cell research. Now, he is back with a new project: he wants to clone a woolly mammoth.

South Korean researcher and cloning pioneer Hwang Woo Suk hasn't been in the scientific spotlight ever since he claimed to have successfully created human embryonic stem cells by cloning six years ago, and that research turned out to be fake.

Now, the controversial veterinarian and researcher is in the headlines again. He wants to use frozen tissue samples to recreate an animal that last walked the earth some 10,000 years ago: a woolly mammoth.

Hwang Woo Su successfully cloned Snuppy in 2005

The scientist recently signed an accord to that effect with a university in Russia's Sakha Republic.

Vast areas of the republic are covered in permafrost that has begun to thaw over the years due to climate change, uncovering the well-preserved remains of several mammoths that had lain frozen in the ice for more than 10.000 years.

To clone new life from the remains, Hwang needs an intact cell nucleus that he hopes could contain the animal's entire genetic information. The scientist would then have to replace the nuclei of egg cells from a related species - in this case an Indian elephant - with those taken from the mammoth's cells.

It is possible - in principle. Three years ago, as part of a mammoth cloning project in Japan, researchers there managed to clone a mouse from the cells of a rodent that had been frozen for 16 years. Nothing has been heard of this project since then.

Fragmented DNA

Alex Greenwood, a biologist at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) in Berlin, is skeptical about the mammoth-cloning project. A first look into the microscope may give scientists reason for hope because they can discern contours of cells and even cell nuclei in the mammoth tissue. But the structures are not intact, Greenwood said, "They are frozen imprints of ancient cells."

The biologist has ruled out that the mammoth tissue from Siberia can contain functioning cells. "Some 10,000 years of permafrost are quite different from 16 years in a freezer," he said, referring to the Japanese experiment.

Temperatures are not constant in Siberia, so according to the biologist, the tissue thawed and froze several times over the course of the millennia. That process destroyed all the live cells' microstructures - what DNA is left is fragmented.

"There is no way it can function," Greenwood said.

Genetic puzzle

The mammoth baby Ljuba was dicovered in 2007

Molecular geneticist Stephan Schuster from Pennsylvania State University agreed that cloning is not the way to recreate a woolly mammoth. But reconstruction might be possible by other means, he added. In 2009, the geneticist and his team successfully reconstructed 70 percent of a mammoth's genetic information. They didn't use cell nuclei but small snippets of genetic material they found on the frozen animals' fur.

The US researchers managed to put the genetic information in the right order, and in just a few years the mammoth genome might be deciphered like that of many other animal, Schuster said. With a complete blueprint on hand, genetic information can be put together bit by bit, the geneticist said.

From bacteria to mammoth

It's easier to build bacteria than a mammoth's DNA

In 2010, US biologist and genetic researcher Craig Venter was the first to recreate a bacterium's complete genome. Schuster is convinced the same could be done in the case of a woolly mammoth - if the animal's genome weren't more than 10,000 times larger than that of bacteria.

As long as it is not possible to create such a large genome synthetically, scientists have to choose a different approach. According to Schuster, researchers could rebuild a similar genome until it becomes more mammoth-like. The closest related species is the Indian Elephant.

George Church, a genetic researcher at Harvard Medical School in Boston, is working on just such a project. His team developed a device that can alter bacteria, a kind of "evolution machine." He said the machine could be used to change bacteria at a basic level so that elephant cells could be turned into mammoth cells.

But even then, science wouldn't actually have created a new mammoth. The genome would have to be transferred to a live cell - the same process used in cloning. Here, too, an Indian elephant cow would be the ovum donor and surrogate mother. Science hasn't reached that point yet, Church said, with a wistful glance at a small stuffed animal mammoth perched on his desk: "But the process is well on its way."

Out of the ice and into the zoo

Schuster said that three years ago, he thought the development absolutely impossible. "Today, I no longer think it is utterly impossible," he said.

But simple cloning like that envisioned by Hwang is not the solution and reconstructing an Ice Age creature is much more complicated, he added.

Author: Michael Lange / db
Editor: Sean Sinico

From http://www.dw.de/dw/article/0,,15812920,00.html

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The Boneyards: Beresovka Mammoth Problem and Entire Islands Composed of Frozen Animal Bones

The Boneyards

The Beresovka Mammoth Problem and Entire Islands Composed of the Bones of Frozen Animals

"In the early part of this century the famous Beresovka mammoth carcass was discovered in Siberia. Nearly intact, the animal was found buried in silty gravel sitting in the upright position. The mammoth had a broken foreleg, evidently caused by a fall from a nearby cliff 10,000 years ago. The remains of its stomach were intact and there were grasses and buttercups lodged between its teeth. The flesh was still edible, but reportedly not tasty.

.

No one has ever satisfactorily explained how the Beresovka mammoth and other animals found frozen in the subarctic could have been frozen before being consumed by predators of the time. Some have proposed a sudden change in climate... The scientist who uncovered the Beresovka mammoth conjectured that the animal fell into a snow-filled ravine that protected the body until it was perhaps covered by gravel during a summer flood"....
Source: Alaska Science Forum November 1, 1976. Mystery of the Mammoth and the Buttercups Article #122 by J. Holland

 "To get to the bottom of the mystery scientists consulted experts in the deep freeze butchery industry. However instead of clearing things up they made them much more troublesome. Basically they said it was not possible to deep freeze a creature the size of a mammoth in the relative moderate temps of the arctic.

Basically if meat is frozen slowly at freezing temp crystals form in the cells of the flesh bursting the cells and dehydrating the meat. The butchers concluded no such process could have produced the deep frozen mammoth meat.

To satisfactorily freeze a side of beef takes 30 minutes at -40 degrees Fahrenheit. To deep freeze a huge living warm blooded mammoth, insulated in thick fur, they estimated that temperatures below -150 degrees would be required. Temperatures so low have never been recorded in nature, not even in the arctic.

This has simply made all normal theories for the Beresovka mammoth that much more obsolete. To add to the mystery consider the climate needed for buttercups to grow. Buttercups enjoy temperate conditions with alternation sun and rain."

Source: AboveTopSecret.com

Excerpts from: The Pleistocene Extinction
by By R. Cedric Leonard

Paleontologists the world over know that something catastrophic happened to the large mammals roaming the world during the Pleistocene Epoch.

Woolly mammoths, mastodons, toxodons, sabre-toothed tigers, woolly rhinos, giant ground sloths, and many other large Pleistocene animals are simply no longer with us. In fact, well over 200 species of animals (involving millions of individual animals) totally disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene some 10,000-12,000 years ago in what is known to Paleontologists as the Pleistocene Extinction.

Moreover, there is evidence of large geological changes which took place, such as massive volcanism, numerous earthquakes, tidal waves, to say nothing of the glacial melting which raised sea-levels several hundred feet worldwide.

It's beginning to look like the Pleistocene Epoch didn't tippy-toe out silently, but rather ended with a large roar.

Geologists and Paleontologists have an innate distaste for catastrophism, and that's understandable. Catastrophists, who in the beginning were identifying every strata of sediment with a worldwide flood, layer upon layer, almost totally discredited the field of geology--and uniformitarianism pulled the science out of the fire.

But now, scientists in both fields are gradually realizing that both catastrophism and uniformitarianism (or gradualism) are at work in nature, and that everything can't be explained using one or the other alone (Gould, 1975).

One of the indicators of the end of the Pleistocene 12,000 years ago is the huge numbers of frozen carcasses in both hemispheres: Canada and Alaska in the western, and Northern Russian and Siberia in the eastern.

 

THE AMERICAN REMAINS

Back in middle 1940s Dr. Frank C. Hibben, Prof. of Archeology at the University of New Mexico mounted an expedition to Alaska to look for human remains. The remains he found were not human, but what he found was anything but evidence of gradualism or uniformitarianism.

Instead he found miles of muck filled with the remains of mammoth, mastodon, several kinds of bison, horses, wolves, bears and lions. Just north of Fairbanks, Hibbens and his associates watched as bulldozers pushed the half-melted muck into sluice boxes for the extraction of gold.

Animal tusks and bones rolled up in front of the blades "like shavings before a giant plane". The carcasses were found in all attitudes of death, most of them "pulled apart by some unexplainable prehistoric catastrophic disturbance" (Hibben, 1946).

The evidence of the violence of nature combined with the stench of rotting carcasses was staggering. The ice fields containing these remains stretched for hundred of miles in every direction (Hibben, 1946). Trees and animals, layers of peat and mosses, twisted and mangled together like some giant mixer had jumbled them some 10,000 years ago, and then froze them into a solid mass.

 

The evidence immediately suggests an enormous tidal wave which raged over the land, tumbling animals and vegetation within its mass, which was then quick-frozen (Sanderson, 1960). But the extinction is not limited to the Arctic.

Paleontologist George G. Simpson considers the extinction of the Pleistocene horse in north America to be one of the most mysterious episodes in zoological history, admitting that in all honesty no one knows the answer.

He also admits that this is only a part of the larger problem of the extinction of many other species in America at the same time (Simpson, 1961).

The horse is merely the tip of the iceberg: giant tortoises living in the Caribbean Sea, the giant sloth, the sabre-toothed tiger, the glyptodont and toxodon. These were all tropical animals. They weren't wiped out because Alaska and Siberia were experiencing an Ice Age.

"Unless one is willing to postulate freezing temperatures across the equator, such an explanation clearly begs the question," say leading Paleontologists (Martin & Guilday, 1967).

Woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceros, giant armadillos, giant beavers, giant jaguars, giant ground sloths and scores of other entire species were all totally wiped out at the end of the Pleistocene. Massive piles of mastodon and sabre-toothed tiger bones were discovered in Florida (Valentine, 1969), while whole mastodons, toxodons, giant sloths and other animals were found in Venesuala quick-frozen among the mountain glaciers (Berlitz, 1969). All died on a global scale, at about the same time, circa. 10,000 B.C.

FROZEN ANIMALS IN SIBERIA

The picture in Siberia and northern Europe is no different. Just north of Siberia whole islands are formed of the bones of Pleistocene animals swept northward from the continent into the frigid waters of the Arctic Ocean.

It has been estimated that some ten million animals lay buried along the rivers of northern Siberia. Thousands of tusks formed a massive ivory trade for the master carvers of China, all from the remains of the frozen mammoths and mastodons of Siberia.

The famous Beresovka mammoth first drew attention to the preserving properties of being quick-frozen when buttercups were found in its mouth and undigested food in its stomach. This was no gradual event--it had to be sudden!

 

And the event was worldwide. The mammoths of Siberia became extinct about the same time as the giant rhinoceros of Europe; the mastodons of Alaska and the bison of Siberia ended simultaneously. The same is true of the Asian elephants and the American camels.

The cause of these extinctions must be common to both hemispheres. If the coming of glacial conditions was gradual, it would not have cause the extinctions, because the various animals could have simply migrated to where conditions were better. What is seen here is total surprise, and uncontrolled violence (Leonard, 1979). Source: Atlantisquest.com

Problems with Frozen Mammoths and the Alleged Extinction of Megafauna at the Hands of Men
Excerpted from: "Red Earth, White Lies", by Vine Deloria

In even the most prejudiced murder trial there is one essential element: there has to have been a killing.

Fancy legal terminology generally requires a body; the corpus delictus as the TV detective shows are fond of telling us. It would seem reasonable, if one was to promulgate a theory of blitzkrieg slaughter as have Martin and Diamond, to identify where the bodies are buried and then take the reader on a gut-wrenching tour through a graveyard of waste and butchery.

We are deprived of this vicarious thrill because the evidence of the destruction of the megafauna suggests a scenario well outside the orthodox interpretation of benign natural processes. Therefore mere mention of the reality of the situation is anathema to most scholars. So let us see what the actual situation is.

The first explorers of the northern shores of Siberia and its offshore northern islands and of the interior of Alaska, and some of its northern islands, were stunned to discover an astronomical number of bones of prehistoric animals piled indiscriminately in hills and buried in the ground.

The graveyards of these animals were classified as "antediluvian" (prior to Noah's flood) by the majority of scientists and laypeople alike who still believed the stories of the Old Testament. Near these graveyards, incidentally, but located in riverbanks on the northern shore of Siberia, are found the famous Siberian mammoths whose flesh was supposedly edible when thawed.

 

Reading an extensive set of quotations is always tedious to readers but I hope you will bear with me in this chapter because it is only in the repetition of the reports of the discoveries of these areas that the entire picture of the demise of the mammoths and other creatures really becomes clear.

These Siberian remains are not the thousands of mammoth bones which Jared Diamond thinks are searched frantically by archaeologists seeking signs of human butchering. It is doubtful that any archaeologists or paleontologists have made extensive studies of the skeletons in these locations or we would certainly have a far different view of megafauna extinction than is presently acceptable to orthodox scholars.

Russian expeditions to Siberia and the northern islands of the Arctic Ocean began in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and with the discovery of these large mounds of animal bones, most prominently the tusks of mammoths and other herbivores, franchises were given to enterprising people who could harvest the ivory for the world market.

Liakoff seems to have been the first important ivory trader and explorer in the late eighteenth century. After his death the Russian govern- ment gave a monopoly to a businessman in Yakutsk who sent his agent, Sannikofi, to explore the islands and locate additional sources of ivory.

Sannikoff's discoveries of more islands and his reports on the animal remains found there are the best firsthand accounts of the Siberian animal graveyards.

Hedenstrom explored the area in 1809 and reported back on the richness of the ivory tusks. Sannikoff discovered the island of Kotelnoi, which is apparently the richest single location, in 1811. Finally, the czar decided to send an official expedition and from 1820 to 1823, Admiral Ferdinand Wrangell, then a young naval lieutenant, did a reasonably complete survey of the area.

Since these expeditions and explorations were inspired by commercial interests and not scientific curiosity; the reports are entirely objective with no ideological or doctrinal bias to slant the interpretation of the finds.

Around the turn of the century interest in the Siberian is- lands seems to have increased, whether as a result of the few Christian fundamentalists who were not reconciled to evolution frantically searching for tangible proof of Noah's flood, or as part of the leisure activities of the English gentlemen of the time, we can't be sure.

The definitive article on the Siberian prehistoric animal remains was written by the Reverend D. Gath Whitley and published by the Philosophical Society of Great Britain under the title "The Ivory Islands in the Arctic Ocean."

It drew on older sources, primarily reports of expeditions of the ivory traders, and captured the spectacular nature of the discoveries well.

Liakoff discovered, on an island that now bears his name, rather substantial cliffs composed primarily of frozen sand and hundreds of elephant tusks. Later, when the Russian government sent a surveyor, Chwoinoff, to the island he reported that, with the exception of some high mountains, the island seemed to be composed of ice and sand and bones and tusks of ele- phants (or mammoths) which were simply cemented together by the cold.

Famous Baby Mammoth Mummies; Masha and Dima.

Sannikoff explored Kotelnoi, and found that this large island was full of the bones and teeth of elephants, rhinoceroses, and musk-oxen. Having explored the coasts, Sannikoff determined, as there was nothing but barrenness along the shore, to cross the island.

He drove in reindeer sledges up the Czarina River, over the hills and down the Sannikoff River and completed the circuit of the island.

All over the hills in the interior of the island Sannikoff found the bones and tusks of elephants, rhinoceroses, buffaloes, and horses in such vast numbers, that he concluded that these animals must have lived in the island in enormous herds, when the climate was milder.

Hedenstrom explored Liakoff's island in 1809 and discovered that “...the quantity of fossil ivory . . . was so enormous, that, although the ivory diggers had been engaged in collecting ivory from it for forty years, the supply seemed to be quite undiminished.

On an expanse of sand little more than half a mile in extent, Hedenstrom saw ten tusks of mammoths sticking up, and as the ivory hunters had left these tusks because there were still other places where the remains of mammoths were still more abundant, the enormous quantities of elephants' tusks and bones in the island may be imagined!

Indeed, a number of explorers reported that after each ocean storm the beaches were littered with bones and tusks which had been ly- ing on the sea bottom and brought to shore by wave action.

The elephant or mammoth bones and tusks were the most spectacular finds primarily because they were so plentiful and consequently they attracted public attention the most. The islands contained an incredible mixture of bones of many extinct and some living species of mammals. Mixed with the animal bones were trees in all kinds of conditions.

Whitley quoted some of the Russian explorers as reporting "it is only in the lower strata of the New Siberian wood-hills that the trunks have that position which they would assume in swimming or sinking undisturbed.

On the summit of the hills they lie flung upon another in the wildest disorder, forced upright in spite of gravitation, and with their tops broken off or crushed, as if they had been thrown with great violence from the south on a bank, and there heaped up?'

A few conclusions can be drawn from the reports of the Russian ivory traders. First, it appeared that several reasonably large islands were built primarily of animal bones, heaped in massive hills and held together by frozen sand.

To indicate the scope of the debris, we should note that all of these islands are found on modern maps of the area, indicating that we are not talking about little tracts of land of limited area.

Second, the sea floor north of Siberia and surrounding the islands was covered with so many additional bones that it was worthwhile for the ivory traders to check the beaches after every storm to gather up tusks and other bones.

Third, and very important for estimating the scope of the disaster, the ivory was of outstanding quality, so much so that the area provided most of the world's ivory for over a century.

 

Estimates of the number of tusks taken from the islands range in the neighborhood of 100,000 pairs taken between the 1770s and the 1900s. Whitley noted that Sannikoff himself had brought away 10,000 pounds of fossil ivory from New Siberia Island alone in 1809.9-

In reality; however, only about a quarter of the ivory was of commercial grade, so the true figure must approach half a million pairs of tusks.

Fourth, an amazing variety of animals, many extinct, were mixed with the mammoth and rhinoceros bones, although these two animals have become symbolic of the whole menagerie.

Fifth, trees, plants, and other floral materials were indiscriminately mixed with the animal remains, sometimes leading the Russians to suppose that the islands represented a sunken isthmus or broad stretch of land where these animals and the companion plants lived in a warmer climate. The chaotic nature of stratification of the remains soon abused that notion.

Finally, it is important to note that none of the bones of any of the species had carving or butchering marks made by human beings. N. K.Vereshchagin wrote: "The accumulations of mammoth bones and carcasses of mammoth, rhinoceros, and bison found in frozen ground in Indigirka, Kolyma, and Novosibirsk lands bear no trace of hunting or activity of primitive man.

Here large herbivorous animals perished and became extinct because of climatic and geomorphic changes, especially changes in the regime of winter snow and increase in depth of snow cover."

The "climatic and geomorphic changes" must have been very sudden indeed and exceedingly violent, considering the fact that these bones are always described as "heaps" of material deposited as if they had been thrown into a pile by an incredibly strong force.

The testimony regarding the richness of the animal remains in the Arctic north of the continental masses is not restricted to Russian sources. Stephen Taber, writing in his report "Perennially Frozen Ground in Alaska: Its Origins and History," had this to say about the Siberian islands:

Pfizenmayer states that in the New Siberia island collectors have "found inexhaustible supplies of mammoth bones and tusks as well as bones and horns of rhinoceros and other diluvial mammals"; and Dr. Bunge, during expeditions in the summers of 1882-1884, "gathered almost two thousand five hundred first class mammoth tusks on the new Siberian islands of Lyakhov; Kotelnyi, and Fadeyev;" although many collectors had previously obtained ivory from the islands since their discovery in 1770 by Lyakhov.~~

It would seem obvious to anyone seriously pursuing the question of the demise of the mammoth and the other mega- herbivores that a good place to locate the bodies to determine the cause of their demise would be the islands north of the Siberian peninsula. Yet we hear not a word about them in scientific articles and books concerning the overkill hypothesis.

Immediate Source: BearFabrique.org

From s8int.com @ http://www.s8int.com/boneyard4.html

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