Adams mammoth

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Adams mammoth, etching by Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius

Adams mammoth is the name of the first complete skeleton of a woolly woolly mammoth to be discovered by European scientists . The remains of the animal, still covered with skin and soft tissue , were discovered in 1799 in northeast Siberia by Osip Schumachow, an Evenk hunter. In 1806 the German- Russian botanist Michael Friedrich Adams recovered the skeleton and brought it to the Zoological Museum in Saint Petersburg .

Historical background

In Europe, the first reports of mammoths appeared in the 1690s. In 1728 Hans Sloane published two articles in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society , which can be described as the first scientific contributions on the subject of mammoths. Sloane's reports were based on descriptions from travelers and some bone finds from Siberia and Britain. Although he addressed the question of whether or not the mammoth was an elephant , he did not draw any conclusions from it. In 1737 Johann Philipp Breyne took the view that the fossil remains came from an elephant, but could not explain how an animal from the tropics could get to Siberia. He suspected it might have been washed up by the Flood .

Between 1692 and 1806 only four finds of mammoth carcasses were described. None of these finds were recovered. In 1798, the French naturalist Georges Cuvier was able to prove that the fossil remains of the Siberian mammoth differ from the bones of recent elephant species.

Find history

Adams came to Siberia in 1805 as a member of a research group that had joined Count Yuri Golovkin's unsuccessful diplomatic mission to China . After the mission failed, several members of the group stayed on site to do further research. From the ivory hunter Roman Boltunow, to whom Schumachow had sold the animal's tusks, Adams learned in Yakutsk about the discovery of the mammoth in the Lena Delta . With three Cossacks he sailed the Lena down to the mouth. At the end of June 1806 he arrived in Shumakhov's village. At the end of July, Adams, Schumachow and ten men from Schumachow's village traveled to the place where the mammoth was found.

The accessible side of the huge animal had already been eaten away by wolves , and some of the meat had been fed to their dogs by the local hunters. Adams hid the entire skeleton, the skull with ears, eyes and scalp and remnants of soft tissue, most of the skin, which he described as: "of such extraordinary dimensions that ten people ... could lift it with great difficulty", and nearly forty pounds of hair. The tusks and a foreleg as well as the trunk were missing. Adams' group dismantled the carcass of the animal and brought the individual parts to Saint Petersburg. On the return trip he bought a pair of tusks that he believed were the same ones that Schumachow had sold to Boltunow.

Reconstruction of the mammoth

In Saint Petersburg, Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius von Tilenau was commissioned to restore the animal. His task was made easier by the fact that the Kunstkammer owned the skeleton of an Indian elephant that he could use as a reference object . Tilesius made wooden replicas to replace the missing leg bone. His work was one of the first attempts to reconstruct a fossil animal. The reconstruction was essentially correct, but Tilesius made a mistake in arranging the tusks. Instead of inward, he bent it outward. The mistake was not discovered until 1899, but the correct arrangement of the tusks remained a topic of scientific debate until the 20th century.

reception

Adam's account of his trip was published in late 1807 and was soon translated into other European languages. It circulated all over Europe and America. Tilesius made some etchings of its restoration and sent them to other naturalists for review. During this time he worked on a detailed account of the skeleton, which was published in 1815.

The Adams Mammoth is also incorrectly referred to as the Adams Mammoth. This seems to be a folk etymological interpretation of the name for the “first” mammoth, derived from Adam , the “first” human.

See also

literature

  • Michael Adams: Some Account of a Journey to the Frozen-Sea, and of the Discovery of the Remains of a Mammoth. The Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal, Part 1, Vol. 3 (1808).
  • Claudine Cohen: The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myth, and History. University Of Chicago Press, Chicago 2002.
  • Hans Sloane: An Account of Elephants Teeth and Bones Found under Ground. Philosophical Transactions, Vol. 35, (1727-1728).
  • Hans Sloane: Of Fossile Teeth and Bones of Elephants. Part the second. Philosophical Transactions, Vol. 35, (1727-1728).
  • Tilesio (Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius): De skeleto mammonteo Sibirico ad maris glacialis littora anno 1807 effosso, cui praemissae Elephantini generis specierum distinctiones. Mémoires de l'Académie Impériale des Sciences de St. Pétersbourg, vol. 5, Saint Petersburg 1815.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Michael Adams: Some Account of a Journey to the Frozen-Sea, and of the Discovery of the Remains of a Mammoth. The Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal, Part 1, Vol. 3 (1808) pp. 120-137.
  2. ↑ z. B. Evert Ysbrants Ides: Three years travels from Moscow over-land to China: thro 'Great Ustiga, Siriania, Permia, Sibiria, Daour, Great Tartary, etc. to Beijing. W. Freeman, London 1705.
  3. ^ Hans Sloane: An Account of Elephants Teeth and Bones Found under Ground. Philosophical Transactions, Vol. 35, (1727-1728), pp. 457-471, and Hans Sloane: Of Fossile Teeth and Bones of Elephants. Part the second. Philosophical Transactions, Vol. 35, (1727-1728), pp. 497-514.
  4. ^ Johann Philip Breyne: A Letter from John Phil. Breyne, MDFRS to Sir Hans Sloane, Bart. Pres. RS with observations and a description of some Mammoth's bones dug up in Siberia, proving them to have belonged to Elephants. Philosophical Transactions, Vol. 40, (1737-1738), pp. 124-39.
  5. ^ Innokenti Tolmachew: The Carcasses of the Mammoth and Rhinoceros Found in the Frozen Ground of Siberia. Transactions, American Philosophical Society. Vol. 23, 1929, pp. 21-23.
  6. ↑ George Timkowsky, Julius von Klaproth: Travels of the Russian Mission through Mongolia to China: and Residence in Peking, in the Years 1820–1821, Vol. 1, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, London 1827, pp. 128-34.
  7. ↑ a b Tilesio (Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius): De skeleto mammonteo Sibirico ad maris glacialis littora anno 1807 effosso, cui praemissae Elephantini generis specierum distinctiones. Mémoires de l'Académie Impériale des Sciences de St. Pétersbourg, Vol. 5, Saint Petersburg 1815, pp. 406-514.
  8. ↑ In 1795 Juan Bautista Brú de Ramón managed the first reconstruction of a megatherium . See: Martin Rudwick: Bursting the Limits of Time: the Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2005, pp. 356-57.
  9. ^ Claudine Cohen: The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myth, and History. University Of Chicago Press, Chicago 2002 p. 113.
  10. ^ E. Pfitzenmayer: A Contribution to the Morphology of the Mammoth, Elephas Primigenius Blumenbach; With an Explanation of My Attempt at a Restoration. Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 1907, pp. 326-34.
  11. ^ Benjamin Smith Barton: Letter from Doctor Benjamin Smith Barton to Mr. Jeffersont dated Blue Ridge, vicinity of Paris, Virginia, July 13, 1810. The Port folio Vol. 4 1810, p. 340.
  12. ↑ Randall Hyman: Open season on the woolly mammoth. ( Memento from July 18, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) International Wildlife, 1995.