Beryosovka mammoth

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Dermoplasty of the Beryosovka mammoth in the St. Petersburg Zoological Museum.

The Beryosovka mammoth is an exceptionally well-preserved specimen of a woolly mammoth that was preserved in the permafrost of Siberia until the beginning of the 20th century . In 1901 , the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences sent the zoologists Otto Herz (1856–1905) and Eugen Pfizenmayer to the Berjosowka , a right tributary of the Kolyma, to rescue it . A dermoplastic and the skeleton of the mammoth are exhibited in the Zoological Museum in Saint Petersburg .

Finding circumstances

Eugen Pfizenmayer (left) with a helper at the place where the mammoth was found

In August 1900, while pursuing an elk , Ewene Semjon Tarabykin came across the carcass of a mammoth sticking out of the ground on the steep bank of the Berjosowka. Wolves had already eaten the trunk and parts of the exposed back. The carcass was otherwise complete and in exceptionally good condition. Together with other Evens, Tarabykin recovered one of the tusks the next day . When the Cossack Innokenti Jawlowski found out about the discovery, he allowed himself to be taken to the site, covered it up and then informed the authorities.

In April 1901 news of the rare find reached the Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg, which hastily sent an expedition. The curators of the Zoological Museum Otto Herz and Eugen Pfizenmayer traveled to the place where the mammoth was found via Irkutsk , Schigalowo , Ust-Kut , Jakutsk , Verkhoyansk and Srednekolymsk . In the Srednekolymsk police station they found the tusk that Tarabykin had removed. The carcass was reached at the beginning of September, and because the majority of it was in the frozen ground, it was still well preserved. It was located 35 m above the river on a fall field extending in a semicircle up to 113 m high. The horizontal distance to the river to the east was 62 m.

After they had cut off his head, the men built a log cabin over the animal, which they heated with two ovens to thaw the ground and the carcass to be recovered. Since it was not possible to transport the entire animal, the men cut the carcass into smaller parts within three weeks. These were bandaged, wrapped in hay, put in sacks and sewn into cattle and horse hides. The parcels stored outside frozen again. On October 10, the work was completed and the expedition started its journey home with a load of more than 100 poods (around 1.6 tons). Sometimes horses and sometimes reindeer were harnessed to the 20 or so transport sleds. On February 18, 1902, the expedition arrived back in Saint Petersburg in a mail train on the Trans-Siberian Railway .

Findings

The fully grown mammoth bull was 45 to 50 years old at the time of his death. He was in a sitting position, his back legs stretched out under his body. He had several bone fractures in the pelvic area. Several ribs and the right front leg were broken. His injuries had caused a large pool of blood in his abdominal cavity. Pfizenmayer assumed that the animal fell into a hole. It had still tried to free itself, but death had apparently set very quickly, as there were still plenty of unshredded plant residues on the well-preserved tongue and on the molars of the lower jaw. Herz and Pfizenmayer were also able to recover the contents of the stomach. The last meal of the mammoth consisted of various sedges , wild thyme , yellow alpine poppy and Sharp Buttercup , Alpine Meadow Rue and Clematis alpina . Since some of the plants were already seeding, the mammoth will have died in the fall. The predators had already eaten the heart, lungs and liver. The mammoth's skin was two inches thick and the underlying fat layer up to nine inches thick. The reddish-brown fur contained bristly, up to 50 cm long hair, but also a softer undercoat made from an average of 5 cm long hair. The penis and the 35 cm long tail were in excellent condition. The animal had a height of 2.80 m and was 4.05 meters long from the end of the tusks to the first caudal vertebra. More recent age determinations by radiocarbon analysis have shown that it lived about 44,000 years ago.

The Berjosowka mammoth was the best known carcass of a woolly woolly mammoth that had been preserved until then. Rescuing it led to a significant expansion of knowledge about this extinct species of the elephant family . Her skeleton was now known in all parts. Most of the soft tissues and the coat could also be subjected to a detailed analysis. For the first time a well-preserved tail has been found. For the first time, 12 kilograms of undigested stomach contents provided information about the preferred food of the woolly mammoth.

reconstruction

Skeleton of the Beryosovka mammoth in the Saint Petersburg Zoological Museum.

The taxidermists at the Zoological Museum in Saint Petersburg made a dermoplasty from the skin of the Beryosovka mammoth, which shows the animal in the position in which it was found. It has been in the museum's permanent exhibition together with the skeleton specimen since 1903 and is one of its visitor magnets. Pfizenmayer sold small samples of the skin, hair, muscle tissue and stomach contents to the Smithsonian Institution in New York in 1922 . A mammoth ear in the paleontological study collection of Martin Schmidt at the Aschersleben City Museum is also very likely to come from the Berjosowka mammoth.

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Description of the mammoth exhibits of the Zoological Museum in Saint Petersburg on its homepage (in Russian)
  2. ↑ a b Juliane Weiß: Lend me your ear! - A well-traveled mammoth ear makes a stop in Halle . Find of the month July 2017 at the State Museum for Prehistory Halle / Saale, accessed on April 29, 2019.
  3. ↑ Valentina V. Ukraintseva: Mammoths and the Environment . Cambridge University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-1-107-02716-9 , pp. 78 (English, limited preview in Google Book search).
  4. ^ Charles W. Gilmore: A history of the division of vertebrate palaeontology of the United States National Museum. No. 3109 August 5, 1941 . In: Proceedings of the United States National Museum . Volume 90, 1942, pp. 305-377, here p. 365 (English).