This is the mammoth image I remember, from a 1971 book, with no artist credited. It’s actually not as good as I remember, by modern standards at least.
Mammoths and I go way back, not quite to the Ice Age but at least to the late 1970s with my family’s visits to the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum, and Milwaukee Public Museum, to name two prominent places that inspired me. And one of my favourite science books had a colourful mammoth painting on the cover (above), an image that has stayed with me as awesomely evocative.
Stomach-Churning Rating: 3/10. But there’s a butt below, but that’s too late for you now. And there’s poo and other scatological (attempts at) humour. Otherwise, bones and a baby mammothsicle.
Fast forward to the 2000’s and I’m studying mammoths, along with their other kin amongst the Proboscidea (elephants and relatives). I even bumped into a frozen mammoth in Sapporo, Japan, nine years ago–
Yep. That’s what it looks like. Nope, not the front end. That dark orifice is not the mouth. This is a mammoth that was found on Bolshoi Lyakhovsky island, in the east Siberian arctic (New Siberian Islands archipelago), in 2003. Just think of finding this and being all excited then realizing, “Jackpot! Wait… Oh man, I just found the ass. I’ve discovered a mammoth bunghole, dammit.” Still, it’s pretty damn amazing, as frozen Ice Age buttocks go. I’d love to find one. I would not be bummed.
found on Bolshoi Lyakhovskiy island in 2003
What I know now that I didn’t realize as a kid, is that a mammoth is an elephant in all but name. Mammoths are more closely related to Asian elephants than either is to African elephants, and all of these elephants are members of the group Elephantidae. If we saw a smallish Columbian mammoth, we’d probably mostly look upon it as similar to a slightly hairy Asian elephant (but a scientist would be able to spot the distinctive traits that each has). Only woolly mammoths adopted the uber-hirsute state that we tend to think of as a “mammoth” trait. Think about it: a big animal would benefit most from a thick hairy insulation in an extremely cold habitat, and Columbian mammoths ranged further south than Woolly ones. No mammoths were radically different from living elephants, unless you count the dwarf ones. But as a kid, like most people do, I saw them as something else: an exotic monster of the past, eerily unlike anything today, and bigger too. And mammoths have the added mystique of the extinct.
Now I see mammoths as neither exotic nor that far in the past. Giant ground sloths, now those are still alien and exotic to me. I don’t get them. I know elephants pretty well, and I can understand mammoths in their light and in light of mammoth fossils. Various mammoth species persisted as late as maybe 10,000 (for the Woolly and Columbian species; the latter seeming to vanish earlier) to <4000 (for isolated Siberian forms) years ago, into quasi-historic times. And only some mammoths got larger than African elephants (Loxodonta) do, such as Columbian mammoths (~10,000 kg or more maximal body mass; Loxodonta is closer to 7-10 tonnes at best).
Lately, coincidence has brought me new knowledge of – and even greater interest in – mammoths.
First, a fortunate last-minute visit to Waco, Texas’s “Mammoth Site” (see my Flickr photo tour here) two weeks ago during a short visit to give a talk in that fine central Texan city.
Second, the subject of today’s post: the Natural History Museum’s new special exhibit “Mammoths: Ice Age Giants“, which is open until 7 September. The exhibit was created by the Field Museum in Chicago, but the NHM has given it a special upgrade under the expert guidance of mammoth guru Prof. Adrian Lister of the NHM, who was very kind to give me a tour of the exhibit.
What follows is primarily a photo-blog post and review of the exhibit, but with some thoughts and facts and anecdotes woven through it. Dark setting, glass cases, caffeination, crowds, and mobile phone camera rather than nice SLR in hand means that the quality isn’t great in my images– but all the more reason to go see the exhibit yourself! All images can be clicked to em-mammoth them.
On entry, one views a mammoth skeleton with a timelapse video backdrop that shows how the landscape (somewhere in USA) has changed since ~10,000 BCE.
The first part of the exhibit does a nice job of introducing key species of Proboscidea (elephants and their closest extinct relatives), with a phylogeny and timescale to put them into context, starting with the earliest forms:
from species like the tapir-sized Moeritherium…
Skull of Moeritherium, reconstructed. Not that different from an early sirenian (seacow) in some ways, and general shape, whereas still quite a long way from a modern elephant in form– but the hints of tusks and trunk are already there.
…To the early elephantiform Phiomia, here shown as a smallish animal but I’m told it actually got quite large. And continuing with giant terrestrial taxa…
I was awed by this reconstruction of the huge early elephantiform-relative Deinotherium, with the short, swollen trunk and downturned tusks– so bizarre!
Looking down onto the roof of the mouth of an NHM specimen of Deinotherium. Big, sharper-edged, almost rhino-like teeth; far from the single mega-molars of modern elephants.
The lower jaw (top) and fairly straight tusk (bottom) of the widespread, early elephantiform Gomphotherium.
The big “shovel-tusked” elephantiform Amebelodon. This was one of the earliest stem elephants I learned of as a kid; the odd tusks still stir wonder in me.
Amebelodon lower jaw, sans shovel tusks. Extended chin looks like some sort of childrens’ fun-slide. To me, anyway.
Next, there are some fun interactive displays of elephant biomechanics!
How would a mammoth hold up its head? This lever demonstration shows how a nuchal ligament helps. Tension on the nuchal ligament is a force that acts with a large lever (represented by the big neural spines on the vertebrae around the shoulders, forming the mammoths’ “hump” there), creating a large moment (i.e. torque; rotational force) that holds the head aloft.
I love this robotic elephant trunk demonstration. It captures some of the weirdness of having a muscular hydrostat attached to your lip and nostrils. Not so easy for a human to control!
But forget the myths about elephants having 40,000 to 150,000 muscles in their trunk. They have three muscle layers: a circumferential one, an oblique one and a longitudinal one. Like any muscles, especially ones this large, the layers each consist of many muscle fibres. That’s where the 40-150k myth comes from, but muscle fibres (cells) are at a more microscopic level than whole muscles (organs). Elephants do have excellent control of their trunks, but it’s not magical. It’s just different.
Then we come to the centrepiece of the exhibit, the ~42,000 year old Woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) baby “Lyuba“, which the NHM added to the original exhibit in this new version, as a star attraction — and a big win. Adrian Lister related to me how he’d never seen Lyuba in person before (access to it was tightly guarded for years). So when the NHM received the crate and held a press event to open it and reveal Lyuba, a journalist asked Adrian to act excited, to which he responded something like, “I don’t need to act! I’m very excited!” I would be, too! Full story on Lyuba’s arrival, by NHM site here. A key paper on Lyuba by Fisher et al. is here.
Studies of tooth growth in Lyuba reveal her gestation period (like living elephants, ~22 months), season of birth (early spring), and age at death (~1 month), among other information.
Here we can see the right ear, which was gnawed off along with the tail by dogs of the reindeer herders that found and retrieved Lyuba in 2006. Regardless, there’s loads of anatomy preserved!
A hump of juvenile “brown fat” sits atop the head and neck of Lyuba. This probably was metabolized during growth to warm the baby; brown fat is packed with mitochondria and thereby conducts what is called “non-shivering thermogenesis”. Furthermore, Lyuba has very strange flanges on the trunk (also visible in 1 other frozen mammoth specimen, but here preserved very clearly! What were they used for?). More details are visible postcranially…
The body was naturally “freeze-dried”, with the addition of later rounds of soaking in formalin and ethanol, leaving the body dessicated and stiff, permanently stuck in a lifelike pose as seen below:
Whole view from an exhibit panel (you cannot photograph the specimen but these are fair game!). Here we see hair on the right forearm and remnant of the ear, and the labia and nipples showing it is a female mammoth are also preserved. The head-hump is lost during growth, and the shoulder changes to change the Asian elephant-like convex curvature of the back into the characteristic humped-shoulder form of a mammoth. But ontogeny still reveals the evolutionary connection of Elephas and Mammuthus.
Lyuba and scientists studying her, which also shows how rigid the carcass is; one can almost stand it up. Inside the digestive tract, researchers found chewed up plant material that was probably dung eaten by the baby to gain vital bacterial digestive flora, and Lyuba had plenty of body fat and ingested milk, indicating that she did not starve to death. Rather, vivianite in the respiratory tract indicates drowning as the cause of her demise. Perfusion of the body by these vivianites may have helped to preserve the body.
Answering a question the public may be wondering about: is the hype about cloning a mammoth very soon true? Nope. Well addressed, including what to me is the urgent question: would cloning a mammoth be ethical?
The fourth part of the exhibit takes on a largely North American focus to first illustrate what mammoths were like biologically, and second to wow the visitor with some huge beasts in full body, full scale glory, as we shall see!
Mammoth hair! These samples and recent molecular studies show that mammoths were not ginger-coloured as we long thought, but rather the ginger color comes as the dark grey-brown-black colour fades postmortem, as a preservational artefact (story here). I didn’t know that; cool.
Mammoth chow! I liked this addition to the exhibit. This brought mammoth ecology closer to home for me.
Mammoth poop!
After the biology explanations, let there be megafauna!
Mammoth skull! A nice one, too.
Top predators of Ice Age North America: Arctodus (short-faced bear– does the short face mean they were happy, unlike a long face? Sorry but they never are shown as very happy, unless it is the joy of whupass) and Homotherium (the other sabre-toothed cat; not the longer-toothed Smilodon).
Skulls of North American (mega)fauna: left to right, top to bottom: horse, short-faced bear, giant ground sloth, then camel, sabretooth cat, rabbit, direwolf (viva Ned Stark!), and pronghorn antelope.
Mastodon (Mammut americanum) skeleton!
Mammoths (and perhaps mastodons, etc.) seem to have been wiped out by a combination of climate change and habitat fragmentation, combined with what this item symbolizes: human hunting. This beautiful piece is the main part of an atlatl, or javelin-hurling lever. It would have given Ice Age hunters the extra power they’d need to penetrate mammoth hide and cause mortal injuries. It is also a great tie-in to my recent post on the British Museum’s odd-animals-in-art.
Finally, the exhibit surveys the kinds of mammoths that existed- there is a huge reconstruction of a Columbian mammoth near the mastodon (above), then smaller kinds and discussions of dwarfism, which is another strength of NHM mammoth research:
Woolly mammoth lower jaw (right) and its likely descendant, the pygmy mammoth of the Californian coastline, Mammuthus exilis.
The world’s smallest mammoth (left), molar tooth compared with that of its much larger ancestor Palaeoloxodon. The status of Mammuthus creticus as a dwarf mammoth from Crete was cemented by Victoria Herridge and colleagues, including Adrian Lister at the NHM.
Pygmy mammoth reconstruction. Shorter than me. I want one!
In the end, from all that glorious proboscidean diversity we were left with just 2 or 3 species of elephantids today (depending on your species concepts; it’s probably worth calling the African forest elephant its own species, Loxodonta cyclotis). The exhibit closes with a consideration of their conservation and fate. Ironically, this elephant skull could not be mounted with its tusks on display, because that would be commercializing ivory usage– even though the whole point of the exhibit’s denouement is to explain why elephants need protection!
Reactions to the exhibit: the photos tell the tale. It’s undeniably great, in terms of showing off the coolness of mammoths, other proboscideans and Ice Age beasties, to the general public. I felt like the factual content and learning potential was good. It didn’t feel at all like pandering to the lowest common denominator like some other exhibits I’ve seen (cough, Dino Jaws, cough). I loved the reconstructions, which were top quality in my opinion. I could have done with some more real skeletons, yet more realistically the exhibit hall was already large and full of cool stuff. But give me a break: Lyuba. This trumps everything. Going to see a real friggin’ frozen mammoth baby buries the needle of the awesomeness meter on the far right. That’s pretty much all I need to say. The spectacle was a spectacle.
This exhibit shows a lot of work, a lot of thought, and a personalized NHM touch that reflects the actual research (even very recent work!) that NHM staff like Prof. Lister are doing with collaborators around the globe. What more could we want, a herd of cloned mammoth babies frolicking around and tickling guests with their flanged trunks? Don’t hold your breath.
You’ve got just over 2 months to see the exhibit. Don’t come complaining on September 8 “BBBBBbbbut I didn’t know, I didn’t think it would be that cool! I just thought there’d be a guy in a Snuffleupagus suit signing autographs!” You have a duty as a Freezerino to go bask in the frozen glory of these Ice Age critters. There may be an exam at the end. 🙂
Is the exhibit kid-friendly? More or less. The text is more targeted at teenager-level or so, but the visual impact is powerful without it. I’d warn a sensitive child about the withered baby mammoth body before showing it to them, so they aren’t caught off guard and scarred by the experience. I saw plenty of kids in the exhibit and they all seemed happy. Parents may want to linger longer and absorb all the interesting information, whereas kids may blitz through or goof around, so plan accordingly if you’re inbound with sprogs.
You know what I was eyeing up in the gift shop…
Aside: The frozen mammoths get me wondering- what else does the Siberian (or extreme northern Canadian/Scandinavian) permafrost conceal? There are a lot of awesome Ice Age megafauna I’d cut my left XXXXX off to study quasi-intact… think about how amazing it would be to find a giant ground sloth (not bloody likely), sabretooth cat, or other species. There’s a lot of north up north. A lot of space and ice. A lot could happen. And climate change will make discoveries like this more likely, while the melting (and humanity) lasts…
Wool we ever find the Lyuba of woolly rhinos (Coelodonta)? Cast of a mummified woolly rhino from the NHM’s entry hall. More of these finds are likely, I’d say.
What's In John's Freezer? 
“What I know now that I didn’t realize as a kid, is that a mammoth is an elephant in all but name. Mammoths are more closely related to Asian elephants than either is to African elephants, and all of these elephants are members of the group Elephantidae. If we saw a smallish Columbian mammoth, we’d probably mostly look upon it as a slightly hairy Asian elephant. ”
me too…
crazy on that…the same but all in name.
didn’t know that is across many fields of biology.
I saw a great video…Living Fossils by Dr. Carl Werner, he received his undergraduate degree in biology, with distinction, at the University of Missouri, graduating summa cum laude. He received his doctoral degree in medicine at the age of 23. I shows a multitude of animals, plants, etc that if you were to see the skeletons, would never classify together but amazingly, those that are the same in virtually every possible way are classified completely different.
I appreciate that you do not take the mainstream simplicity of everything taught.
kudos
Thank you. Carl Werner is a creationist with a clear non-scientific agenda so I do not take the simplicity of what he attempts to teach. Indeed, plenty of others have done a good job debunking his distortions of science; e.g.
http://ps3udonimm.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/living-fossils-dr-carl-werner-and-evolution/
What I learned as a kid was wrong because science always moves forward and learns new things; back then it was not clear that mammoths are truly on the elephant branch. That this has changed is a reflection of science’s self-correcting process. It hasn’t filtered down to plenty of non-scientists, but such transfer from specialist knowledge to general public knowledge happens gradually– like evolution often does. My role as a science communicator is to ensure the best representation of modern scientific knowledge gets told, and never to invoke magic (e.g. religion) to explain things we don’t understand, but to inquire deeper with sound methods and evidence.
Thank you for the article. I did read it and still see assumptions on the writers part as the writer clamed about Carl Werner.
The one element which is not honest is why, if true, have the mainstream scientific community taken the scientific name of a “fossilized” organism that exactly matches the living counterpart and given that a completely different scientific name?
As he says…it’s not were he started when he was beginning his research. He would have backed the article that you referenced.
I do understand that he does now slant for the creation view. I don’t think his research invoked magic (dark or illusional). Also, I don’t believe his view was arguing for the absolute authority of the bible either. Sometimes a quick cop out if someone mentions God. (that’s a different topic).
I do understand how that presupposition would lead someone to “discredit” his work. I don’t think anyone’s work should be discredited because they are Mulsim, Buddist, Christian or an evolutionist.
We all come to the table with thoughts, beliefs and ideas that can create a personal bias. I thought Dr. Werner was clearly not trying to push the “ressurection of Jesus through a test tube”. Science is nothing more than human beings examining the world around us via our 5 senses; sometimes using telescopes and microscopes among many other manmade instruments.
Beliefs shouldn’t bias our ability to examine. We get in trouble when we discriminate based on religion: naturalistic or supernaturalistic.
That would pit Newton against Einstein.
sort of.
The article I posted is just the first one I ran across that had some validity. There are plenty more, and then there is the peer-reviewed scientific record, which is what really matters. None of these support Werner’s major ideas. Whether his arguments involved the direct invocation of magic or not doesn’t matter- if he is falsifying one hypothesis, the question is what the other one is, and normally for creationists that is Creation, which is not testable in any sense (i.e. requires the invocation of magic).
Like any real scientist, I evaluate claims based on the methods and evidence vs. the weight of contrary evidence, not by the credentials of the person, by their religion or lack thereof, etc. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and arguments like Werner’s lack that. A key problem with pseudoscience like that committed by Werner and others is that it does not play by the fair standards of science (which is not religion), and clearly mixes personal agenda with methods and data, to obtain a desired conclusion and then over-stretch it to make broader conclusions (e.g. about evolution). Plenty of sites and studies out there debunk his claims so I won’t waste more time on it; it has already been done for me.
Not all opinions or beliefs are equally valid. That’s what science is good at, sorting out the best reconstruction of reality based on what data exist and what methods can be used to understand it. I’m happy with that way of examining reality; alternatives pale in comparison.
“The one element which is not honest is why, if true, have the mainstream scientific community taken the scientific name of a “fossilized” organism that exactly matches the living counterpart and given that a completely different scientific name?”
–That’s a sweeping generalization that generally is not correct. In the case of mammoths, they are clearly NOT the same as Asian or African elephants, but they are unique species of elephants, rather than just more distantly related to elephants (like mastodons, or going further away from elephantids, Gomphotherium; further yet, Phiomia and so on…). That conclusion comes from bones, DNA, and other evidence, assessed with diverse methods. And hence the different name is deserved: they are mammoths (member of a smaller group) and they are elephant(id)s (member of a more inclusive group). There is zero dishonesty in any of this; just science’s incremental knowledge-sifting process at play.
“…peer-reviewed scientific record, which is what really matters.”
unless someone agrees with their peers…then they become less likely to remain a peer. (Evolution theories and Creation theories both have blind spots)
I was not calling you dishonest. You were calling mammoths a modification via environment: long hair, short hair, etc… It is the only version of evolution that has ever been observed.
As far as invoking magic:
What are the odds of rolling a Yahtzee all sixes on the very first roll that you ever rolled?
Wait a minute: What are the odds of rolling a Yahtzee on the very first roll, but all of the dice are blank?
k: no dice…before you roll…there are no dice to roll with…NOW, what are the odds of rolling a Yahtzee on the very first roll.
moment please: No cup…no such thing as the game of Yahtzee and of course there is no one to roll.
Please, let me know the odds of a very first roll of nothing making a Yahtzee of all sixes.
point: the mystery of the “Big Bang”…or whatever you choose to call it, needed to come up with better than a handful of dice landing on sixes on the only bang never recorded. Fine…multiple bangs of nothing or no one…
But, if you trust that others (mega peer reviewed believers of evolution) have a single answer and you will bank everything on so be it.
But in my evolutionary studies there are 2 points that seem to match science to a tee…
The theory of evolution AND the science of evolution both seem to change over time.
Thank you for letting me share views that may not be agreed upon but I hope you see logic as part of science. Just because a person has a degree, Christian or non-Christian doesn’t make them an authority. They all sat under people who taught what was closest to their heart. (If they agreed; they get their diploma…sometimes…not.) For whatever reason…
btw…the article you sent a link to, mentioned underwater animals and that water environments wouldn’t have as much change due to the environment.
good point…but he must have only watched the first 10 minutes of Dr. Werner’s video…because he would have obviously have told the rest of what was found.
Dr. Werner’s studies took him to naturalistic museums, quarries, and digs that not only had amphibians, birds, plants and more. So your “peer reviewed” article of finding water animals in dinosaur rock layers was what expected by evolutionists or his denomination of evolution was layered in leaving out information that non-christian museums and scientists have found at least 100 mammals, and nearly every type of animal in rock layers that had dinosaurs in them.
of course, you can choose to disreguard observational and verifiable science…and many have and many will.
Crazy question about dinosaur dig sites…if you found a bone and after a couple of hours, days, weeks or months, it turns out to be a duck or a pigeon fossil…do you think anyone would have ever jumped up and called the organization that is funding tens of thousands of dollars and tell them you found a dog, cat or a rat?
yes, someone who believes the Biblical account would…but…of course, they don’t count…do they?
I don’t think I need to defend peer review here; it’s a process that has been well agreed on and has worked nicely for many years.
“Only version of evolution that has been observed”- nonsense. Whether one means microevolution (observable across any generations of any species) or speciation or macroevolution or anything in between, there are plenty of cases– e.g. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html
I don’t have to agree that logic is part of science; it simply is. But it’s how one uses it that matters, and you’ve mis-applied it in your last comment, with the Yahtzee analogy and subsequent ones. There’s no magic bullet, such as one “living fossil”, or two or whatever, that makes evolution collapse, because it is supported by many pillars of methods and evidence, from genes to fossils to experiments to computer analyses and mathematics and so on.
The “living fossils” have been misinterpreted by Werner and his allies; they are not correct just because they hold an underdog, heterodox view that goes against the grain of modern science’s orthodoxy. They are wrong because their methods and evidence are improperly used. I don’t disregard any valid information, but invalid claims can be thus disposed.
The talkorigins.org website has plenty of information that corrects misconceptions such as those in your replies. I suggest interested parties start there, or read a textbook on evolution, such as this one:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Tangled-Bank-Introduction-Evolution/dp/0981519474
Your hypothetical example is nonsense. Evolutionary biology has embraced “living fossils” as entirely sensible; evolutionary rates vary from very slow to very fast, depending on the environment. We can see that today in many ways, and also infer it in the past, thanks to the fossil record.
I always used to think of mammoths as strange, exotic monsters too, and while they maybe aren’t all that exotic they are undeniably cool. You’re a lucky so-and-so getting to see Lyuba!
About 5 years ago when I worked at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, New Jersey, we had this exhibit come through. It is really well executed. As an exhibit designer, I can attest to that. I absolutely loved the sculptures. It was a serious challenge to get the whole exhibit to fit comfortably in our space. One of my biggest surprises was how much security and maintenance goes into having baby Lyuba on site. We had to mount multiple cameras just for Lyuba. As well, someone had to frequently change desiccant packs. Climate control was definitely an issue. My hat went off to our facilities crew who don’t typically deal with artifacts and maintaining a very specific climate.
Thanks for this interesting set of observations! I can imagine how hard it is to set up and maintain this exhibit. Lyuba is such a precious celebrity.
Looks like a wonderful exhibition, if only I lived closer to it! I was wondering if maybe the ivory tusks weren’t on display for reasons similar to those in Ireland and throughout Europe right now. Criminal gangs have been stealing them straight off the displays and even robbing warehouses to sell the ivory to Chinese traditional medicine manufacturers. That could be part of why the skull of the elephant didn’t have its tusks.
In the Natural History Museum in Dublin the stuffed rhino looks very forlorn with his horn missing, and a sign explaining why. I’ve also seen signs beside other displays in other museums claiming the horns on display are not real ivory, because of the threat of robbery. Just a thought.
Thanks! Not so much for security reasons, no. They have mammoth and other tusks and fossils on display that are also valuable. It’s more because of the illegality of displaying elephant material for commercial gain, I heard.