Discover Siberia

While frozen mammoth carcasses had been excavated by Westerners as early as 1728 (by German scientist Daniel Messerschmidt), the first mammoth fossil fully documented by modern science was unearthed by a hunter in Siberia during 1799, on the banks of the Lena River. The hunter allowed it to thaw (a process taking several years) until he could retrieve the tusks for sale to the ivory trade in Yakutsk. He then abandoned the specimen, allowing it to largely decay before its recovery, possibly even having been partially devoured by modern wolves.

In 1806, Scottish botanist Mikhail Adams rescued what remained of the specimen and brought it to the Zoological Museum of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersberg for study. The specimen, which became known as the Adams mammoth, was stuffed and mounted, and continues to be on display at the Zoological Institute.

Preserved frozen remains of woolly mammoths, with much soft tissue remaining, have been found in the northern parts of Siberia. This is a rare occurrence, essentially requiring the animal to have been buried rapidly in liquid or semi-solids such as silt, mud and icy water which then froze. This may have occurred in a number of ways. Mammoths may have been trapped in bogs or quicksands and either died of starvation or exposure, or drowning if they sank under the surface. The evidence of undigested food in the stomach and seed pods still in the mouth of many of the specimens suggests that neither starvation nor exposure are likely. The maturity of this ingested vegetation places the time period in autumn rather than in spring when flowers would be expected. The animals may have fallen through ice into small ponds or potholes, entombing them. Many are certainly known to have been killed in rivers, perhaps through being swept away by river floods. In one location, by the Berelekh River in Yakutia in Siberia, more than 9,000 bones from at least 156 individual mammoths have been found in a single spot, apparently having been swept there by the current.