Mammoth Fossils
In the distant past, Mammoth Bones were assumed to be the remains of giants....
Siberian Carcasses: Mammoths in the Freezer The bodies of animals, primarily mammoths, have been emerging from the Siberian permafrost since the end of the Ice Age. Siberians and Eskimos believed the mammoth to be a living animal because, on seeing its remains - including flesh and blood - exposed by rivers and thawing, they assumed it was some kind of gigantic mole that occasionally came to the surface like a whale, but which died immediately on exposure to sun - or moonlight. This explained neatly why nobody ever saw one alive.
The distribution of these frozen remains corresponds to that of the permafrost, nature's deep freeze; hence they are found only north of 60 degrees latitude, and mostly above the Arctic Circle. Ever since the late Pleistocene (and in some places for at least a million years), the ground here has been frozen to a depth of up to 1,500 ft (500m), and in the brief summer, only the top 5 feet (1.5m) thaw out.
No single catastrophic event can account for all these remains, and there is no real evidence that any of the animals slowly froze to death: many specimens appear healthy, with full stomachs. Some clearly died of asphyxia, either by drowning or by being buried alive in a mudflow or when the ground above them caved in. Some probably got bogged down in marshy places, while others may have crashed through thin river ice or into concealed, snow-filled gullies.
Such accidental deaths and burials may explain why the Siberian carcasses are predominantly mammoths and rhinos: these were heavy-footed giants, whose sheer size would make it especially dangerous for them to graze at the soft edges of a gully or river bluff and hard for them to extricate themselves when trapped. Often the animals, alive or dead, were then enveloped by solifluction - water-saturated sediments that slid downhill, then froze around them.
It is the build-up of layers of ice in the sediments around the bodies that accounts for the perfect preservation of these "mummies": the ice desiccated the soil and dehydrated the carcasses as the moisture was drawn into the surrounding layers of ice and crystallized. However, by no means all bodies are intact in the permafrost, since many animals seem to have been exposed to predators and the elements for some time before being buried and, therefore, had largely decomposed prior to preservation.
Most of the preserved carcasses in Siberia are dated to two periods: before 30,000 years ago, and between 13,000 and 10,000 years ago. The intervening millennia have yielded only skeletal material. One possible explanation for this is that these periods had a slightly milder climate (the coldest period was 15,000 to 25,000 years ago). with more water available to create mudflows, carcasses would become covered more quickly and hence have been more effectively preserved.
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