Re: OK Nancy, Where Is It?
Earth in Upheaval, The Ivory Islands, by Velikovsky
Fossil tusks of the mammoth - an extinct elephant -
were found in northern Siberia and brought southward
to markets at a very early time. Northern Siberia
provided more than half the world's supply of ivory,
many piano keys and many billiard balls being made
from the fossil tusks of mammoths. In 1797 the body
of a mammoth, with flesh, skin, and hair, was found
in northeastern Siberia. The flesh had the
appearance of freshly frozen beef; it was edible, and
wolves and sled dogs fed on it without harm. The
ground must have been frozen ever since the day of
their entombment; had it not been frozen, the bodies
of the mammoths would have putrefied in a single
summer, but they remained unspoiled for some
thousands of years. In some mammoths, when
discovered, even the eyeballs were still preserved.
[All] this shows that the cold became suddenly
extreme .. and knew no relenting afterward. In the
stomachs and between the teeth of the mammoths
were found plants and grasses that do not grow
now in northern Siberia .. [but are] .. now found
in southern Siberia. Microscopic examination of
the skin showed red blood corpuscles, which
was proof not only of a sudden death, but that the
death was due to suffocation either by gases or
water.
Raising the Mammoth, Discovery Channel, 12 Mar 2000
Last October, amid the bitterness of the Siberian
tundra, the carcass of a male woolly mammoth
was lifted out of the ground where it had been
frozen for more than 23,000 years. Soon scientists
hope to begin searching that long-dead body for
clues of an ancient world. The effort of the team
led by French explorer Bernard Buigues to dig out
the frozen block of earth containing the mammoth,
then carry it almost 300 kilometers by a giant
helicopter, was only a first step. After spending
the winter above ground, the huge chunk of tundra
and mammoth will soon be moved inside an ice
cave in Khatanga, Siberia. There, a group of
scientists will slowly begin thawing small
sections of the animal and permafrost to look
back into the world in which mammoths lived.
Intact Mammoth to be Carved from Siberian Tundra
Reuters, 23 Jul 1999
An adult woolly mammoth mummified 23,000
years ago under Siberia's frozen tundra will be dug
out of the permafrost and may one day be cloned,
an international team of scientists said on Thursday.
In a scenario worthy of the fictional, cloned
dinosaurs in the "Jurassic Park" movies, French
explorer Bernard Buigues said the intact soft tissues
and the hair of the Jarkov mammoth held out the
possibility of recovering intact DNA. "It will be
interesting to know the habits of this animal and
what he was doing in this place that was a very
difficult place to live," Buigues said in a
teleconference with reporters from southwestern
South Dakota, a center for fossil finds. "In the
pictures we have, you see all the kinds of hair that
the mammoth has. The colour is intact," said
Buigues, who is affiliated with the National
History Museum of France. "The smell of the
skin is also there." ... This adult specimen is
different from others found in Siberia and
elsewhere because scientists will be able to
examine grass and other flora that were preserved
with it, and possibly recover organs and even
sperm. Many of the plants mammoths were
known to eat on the mountainous steppes of
what is now the North American Rocky
Mountains and Siberia are known to still exist,
but the mystery of the mammoth's extinction
persists, the scientists said. "In general, we
know a lot about the woolly mammoth from
(mostly skeletal) specimens found in France,
Spain and Russia," said Dick Mol, another
member of the team who is affiliated with the
Natuurmuseum in the Netherlands. "If we can
find more material of the woolly mammoth,
including soft parts such as the ears and the
tail, we can learn much more," he said.
Q: How is it that grasslands and the herbivors munching on them were
frozen solid, with no melting afterwards, as through the crust from
southern siberia had been moved suddenly into the polar circle?