124 MIGHTY ANIMALS 



for this may be that the animals died by being 

 caught in mud, which quickly closed over them and 

 served as an air-tight tomb. With one of these 

 skeletons was found some long, soft, woolly hair; 

 so it is thought that there may have been Hairy 

 Mastodons, just as there were Hairy Mammoths. 



None of the Mastodons have been recovered in 

 as good a state of preservation as have some of the 

 Mammoths that lived in a cold climate. For this 

 reason we know more about the way the Mammoth 

 looked than we do about the appearance of the 

 Mastodon. In Siberia, Mammoths have been dis- 

 covered with the skin and flesh still on them. The 

 first of these discoveries was made in 1799 by a 

 man who had gone to Lake Onkoul to hunt for 

 fossil Mammoth tusks. One day he saw a huge, 

 dark mass looming up out of the ice in the lake, 

 but he paid no attention to the unusual sight. 

 The next year he returned to the same place to 

 hunt, and again saw the strange object in the ice 

 out in the lake. Still he paid no attention to it. 

 When he went back once more, three years later, 

 the big mass had fallen from the ice and drifted 



