FROZEN MAMMALS OF SIBERIA 
many animals fitted to endure a cold climate, for even then, of 
course, the winters were severe. Among these was an elephant 
averaging about the size of a large Indian one, which —yyam- 
it much resembled, except in its remarkably small moth. 
and hairy ears and exceedingly long tusks (nine to twelve 
feet), which had a tendency to curve upward and inward 
—not outward, as has usually been erroneously represented ; — 
and both sexes had tusks, which is not the case in Asiatic ele- 
phants now. Furthermore, this ancient northern elephant, like 
the woolly rhinoceros of the same time and region, was clothed, 
at least in winter, with a warm yellowish brown under coat ten 
or twelve inches thick, and a bristlclike, darker, and longer upper 
coat, heaviest on the shoulders, together forming a most suit- 
able garment for an animal in a semiarctic climate. Otherwise 
the mammoth varied only in minor features from those ele- 
phants now before our eyes. 
The first remains of the mammoth were found in the perpetually frozen 
cliffs of earth and ice which border the estuary of the Lena River in 1799, 
and a few years later the skeleton was brought almost entire to St. Peters- 
burg, where it may be still seen. Since that time, landslides and thawings 
have revealed other carcasses, from which, when lucky enough to find them, 
the Yakuts cut flesh to feed their dogs, and perchance got salable tusks. 
The offering of such a tusk disclosed to the Russians at Kolyma, in 1900, 
the discovery of an especially complete carcass, which in 1901 Dr. O. F. 
Herz was able to bring with much completeness to St. Petersburg, and to 
mount in the Imperial Museum. It is plain that this last animal died by 
miring itself in an attempt to get to or from the river. Their stomachs 
show that these Siberian mammoths fed on the leaves and twigs of the pine. 
Thousands of carcasses, however, were floated away to sea by the Siberian 
rivers; perhaps thousands annually, for the islands of their estuaries con- 
tain such masses of skeletons that these bone beds are regularly mined in 
search of fossil ivory —a recognized article of Siberian commerce, and, 
although yellowed by age, nearly as good as “living” ivory. 
“From the earliest times fossil ivory was derived from the buried tusks 
of these elephants. The ancient Chinese worked in it, and even had such 
ideas about the edibility of the animal’s flesh as makes it probable that they 
knew that carcasses were occasionally found on the arctic coast. This ivory 
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