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[ The Fountains of the Great Deep > Frozen Mammoths > General Description ]

General Description

What Is Found.  Since 1800, at least 11 scientific expeditions have excavated fleshy remains of extinct mammoths.⁹ Most fleshy remains were buried in the permafrost of northern Siberia, inside the Arctic Circle. The remains of six mammoths have been found in Alaska. Only a few complete carcasses have been discovered. Usually, wild animals had eaten the exposed parts before scientists arrived.

If we look in the same region for frozen soft tissue of other animals, we learn that several rhinoceroses have been found, some remarkably preserved. (Table 10 on page 270 summarizes 57 reported mammoth and rhinoceros discoveries.) Other fleshy remains come from a horse,¹⁰ a young musk ox,¹¹ a wolverine,¹² voles,¹³ squirrels, a bison,¹⁴ a rabbit, and a lynx.¹⁵

  

If we now look for the bones and ivory of mammoths, not just preserved flesh, the number of discoveries becomes enormous, especially in Siberia and Alaska. Nikolai Vereshchagin, Chairman of the Russian Academy of Science’s Committee for the Study of Mammoths, estimated that more than half a million tons of mammoth tusks were buried along a 600-mile stretch of the Arctic coast.¹⁶ Because the typical tusk weighs 100 pounds, this implies that about 5 million mammoths lived in this small region. Even if this estimate is high or represents thousands of years of accumulation, we can see that large herds of mammoths must have thrived along what is now the Arctic coast. Mammoth bones and ivory are also found in Europe, North and Central Asia, and in North America, as far south as Mexico City.

Dense concentrations of mammoth bones, tusks, and teeth are also found on remote Arctic islands. Obviously, today’s water barriers were not always there. Many have described these mammoth remains as the main substance of the islands.²⁵ What could account for any concentration of bones and ivory on barren islands well inside the Arctic Circle? Also, more than 200 mammoth molars were dredged up along with oysters from the Dogger Bank in the North Sea.²⁶

The northern portions of Europe, Asia, and North America contain bones of many other animals along with those of mammoths. A partial listing includes tiger,²⁷ antelope,²⁸ camel, horse, reindeer, giant beaver, fox, giant bison, giant ox, musk sheep, musk ox, donkey, badger, ibex, woolly rhinoceros, lynx, leopard, wolverine, Arctic hare, lion, elk, giant wolf, ground squirrel, cave hyena, bear, and many types of birds. Friend and foe, as well as young and old, are found together. Carnivores are sometimes buried with herbivores. Were their deaths related? Rarely are animal bones preserved; preservation of so many different types of animal bones suggests a common explanation.

Finally, corings 100 feet into Siberia’s permafrost, have recovered sediments mixed with ancient DNA of mammoths, bison, horses, other temperate animals, and the lush vegetation they require. Nearer the surface, these types of DNA are absent, but DNA of meager plants able to live there today is present.²⁹ The climate must have suddenly and permanently changed to what it is today.

Mammoth Characteristics and Environment. The common misconception that mammoths lived in areas of extreme cold comes primarily from popular drawings of mammoths living comfortably in snowy, Arctic regions. The artists, in turn, were influenced by earlier opinions based on the mammoth’s hairy coat, thick skin, and a 3.5-inch layer of fat under the skin. However, animals with these characteristics do not necessarily live in cold climates. Let’s examine these characteristics more closely.

Hair.  The mammoth’s hairy coat no more implies an Arctic adaptation than a woolly coat does for a sheep. Mammoths lacked erector muscles that fluff up an animal’s fur and create insulating air pockets. Neuville, who conducted the most detailed study of mammoth skin and hair, wrote: “It appears to me impossible to find, in the anatomical examination of the skin and pelage [hair], any argument in favor of adaptation to the cold.”³⁰ Long hair on a mammoth’s legs hung to its toes.³¹ Had it walked in snow, snow and ice would have caked on its hairy “ankles.” Each step into and out of snow would have pulled or worn away the “ankle” hair. All hoofed animals living in the Arctic, including the musk ox, have fur, not hair, on their legs.³⁴ Fur, especially oily fur, holds a thick layer of stagnant air (an excellent insulator) between the snow and skin. With the mammoth’s greaseless hair, much more snow would touch the skin, melt, and increase the heat transfer 10-to-100 fold. Later refreezing would seriously harm the animal.

Skin.  Mammoth and elephant skin are similar in thickness and structure.³⁵ Both lack oil glands, making them vulnerable to cold, damp climates. Arctic mammals have both oil glands and erector muscles—equipment absent in mammoths.³⁶ 

Fat.  Some animals living in temperate or even tropical zones, such as the rhinoceros, have thick layers of fat, while many Arctic animals, such as reindeer and caribou, have little fat. Thick layers of fat under the skin simply show that food was plentiful. Abundant food implies a temperate climate.

Elephants.  The elephant, which is closely related to the mammoth,³⁷ lives in tropical or temperate regions, not the Arctic. It requires a climate that ranges from warm to hot, and “it gets a stomach ache if the temperature drops close to freezing.”³⁸ Newborn elephants are susceptible to pneumonia and must be kept warm and dry.³⁹ Hannibal crossed the Alps with 37 elephants; the cold weather killed all but one.⁴⁰

Water.  If mammoths lived in an Arctic climate, their drinking water in the winter must have come from eating snow or ice. A wild elephant requires 30–60 gallons of water each day.⁴¹ The heat needed to melt snow or ice and warm it to body temperature would consume about half a typical elephant’s calories. The mammoth’s long, vulnerable trunk would bear much of this thermal (melting) stress. Nursing elephants require about 25% more water.

Salt.  How would a mammoth living in an Arctic climate satisfy its large salt appetite? Elephants dig for salt using their sharp tusks.⁴² In rock-hard permafrost this would be almost impossible, summer or winter, especially with curved tusks.

Nearby Plants and Animals.  The easiest and most accurate way to determine an extinct animal’s or plant’s environment is to identify familiar animals and plants buried nearby. For the mammoth, this includes rhinoceroses, tigers, horses, antelope,⁴³ bison, and temperate species of grasses. All live in warm climates. Some burrowing animals are frozen, such as voles, which would not burrow in rock-hard permafrost. Even larvae of the warble fly have been found in a frozen mammoth’s intestine—larvae identical to those found in tropical elephants today.⁴⁵ No one argues that animals and plants buried near the mammoths were adapted to the Arctic.  Why do so for mammoths?

Temperature.  The average January temperature in northeastern Siberia is about -28°F (60°F below freezing)! During the Ice Age, it was even colder. The long, slender trunk of the mammoth was particularly vulnerable to cold weather. A six-foot-long nose could not survive even one cold night, let alone an eight-month-long Siberian winter or a sudden cold snap. For the more slender trunk of a young mammoth, the heat loss would be more deadly. An elephant usually dies if its trunk is seriously injured.⁴⁶

No Winter Sunlight. Cold temperatures are one problem, but six months of little sunlight during Arctic winters is quite another. While some claim that mammoths were adapted to the cold environment of Siberia and Alaska, vegetation, adapted or not, does not grow during the months-long Arctic night. In those regions today, vegetation is covered by snow and ice ten months each year. Mammoths had to eat voraciously. Elephants in the wild spend about 16 hours a day foraging for food in relatively lush environments, summer and winter.⁴⁷

Three Problems.  Before examining other facts, we can see three curious problems. First, northern Siberia today is cold, dry, and desolate. Vegetation does not grow during dark Arctic winters. How could millions of mammoths and other animals, such as rhinoceroses, horses, bison, and antelope, feed themselves? But if their environment were more temperate and moist, why did it change?

Second, the well-preserved mammoths and rhinoceroses must have been completely frozen soon after death or their soft internal parts would have quickly decomposed. Guthrie has written that an unopened animal continues to decompose long after a fresh kill, even in very cold temperatures, because its internal heat can sustain microbial and enzyme activity as long as the carcass is completely covered with an insulating pelt.⁴⁸ Because mammoths had such large reservoirs of body heat, the freezing temperatures must have been extremely low.

Finally, their bodies were buried and protected from predators, including birds and insects. Such burials could not have occurred if the ground were perpetually frozen as it is today. Again, this implies a major climate change, but now we can see that it must have changed dramatically and suddenly. How were these huge animals quickly frozen and buried—almost exclusively in muck, a dark soil containing decomposed animal and vegetable matter?

Muck.  Muck is a major geological mystery. It covers one-seventh of the earth’s land surface—all surrounding the Arctic Ocean. Muck occupies treeless, generally flat terrain, with no surrounding mountains from which the muck could have eroded. Russian geologists have drilled through 4,000 feet of this muck without hitting solid rock. Where did so much eroded material come from?  What eroded it?

Oil prospectors, drilling through Alaskan muck, have “brought up an 18-inch-long chunk of tree trunk from almost 1,000 feet below the surface. It wasn’t petrified—just frozen.”⁴⁹ The nearest forests are hundreds of miles away.  Williams describes similar discoveries in Alaska:

Though the ground is frozen for 1,900 feet down from the surface at Prudhoe Bay, everywhere the oil companies drilled around this area they discovered an ancient tropical forest. It was in frozen state, not in petrified state. It is between 1,100 and 1,700 feet down. There are palm trees, pine trees, and tropical foliage in great profusion. In fact, they found them lapped all over each other, just as though they had fallen in that position.⁵⁰

How were trees buried under a thousand feet of hard, frozen ground? We are faced with the same series of questions we first saw with the frozen mammoths. Again, it seems there was a sudden and dramatic freezing accompanied by rapid burial in muck, now frozen solid.

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