-
- The entire body of a
woolly mammoth has been exhumed
from the ice of Siberia, 20,000 years
after it perished.
-
- It was dug from a site on the Taimyr peninsula on Sunday
and
flown by helicopter to the town of Khatanga, 150 miles away, a French
member of the team responsible for the operation said yesterday.
-
- Bernard Buigues said
that the beast, named Zharkov in
honour of the family that found it,
was slung under the helicopter and
flown to a cave dug in the
permafrost at Khatanga, which replicates the
dry and chilly conditions
where it was found.
-
- Exposure to warmer or more humid conditions could cause
the remains to start decaying almost instantly.
-
- The head of the mammal was
taken from the body last year
and is already in the cave, where
scientists will carry out painstaking
research, he said.
-
- M Buigues said it was
the first time that a mammoth had
been recovered intact. Previously,
the most exciting finds - also in Siberia
- had been chunks of
preserved flesh.
-
- Two expeditions are in Siberia searching for mammoth
remains: a
Japanese-led team and the international expedition, called Mammuthus,
of which M Buigues is a member and which also includes scientists from
the United States, The Netherlands and Russia.
-
- Both groups hope to extract
cells from the preserved
remains of mammoths and even use them to clone
a new mammoth, using a female
elephant as a surrogate mother.
-
- But M Buigues played
down any Jurassic Park-style reconstruction.
"People often dream
about resurrecting the mammoth using well preserved
cells, but you have
to be more modest," M Buigues said. "We don't
expect to find
red flesh, but rather a kind of dried meat."
-
- Scientists hope that when the
mammoth has been unwrapped
from the icy soil that has preserved it,
light will be shed on how the
animals lived and why they died out, he
said.
-
- The
woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, well-known
from cave paintings,
stood 13ft high, about the same as a full-grown African
bull
elephant.
-
- The last mammoths died out as recently as 4,000 years
ago, but
there is still debate about why.
-
- Some experts believe that they may have been the first
species to be wiped out by man, given that mammoth b
ones and tusks have
been disovered in the habitations of Cro-Magnon
cave dwellers.
-
- But these may have been taken from the bodies of dead
mammoths,
for no evidence has ever been found of mammoth traps or of traces
of
arrow or axe blows on the bones.
-
- A more widely accepted
explanation is that the mammoths
died out because of malnutrition after
climate change caused the dry vegetation
that they ate to suffer a
decline in nutritional quality.
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