Russian Mammoth

The idea of finding and preparation of the mammoth skeleton appeared many years ago. At first, we found an article of Ural archeologist concerning to the large accumulation of the mammoth bones on the Sochva river and some other rivers in Ural Mountains. After hard work in the National Scientific library we obtained a lot of information about Russian mammoth localities in Siberia (especially in Yamalo-Nenetsky region).

Then we organized several scientific expeditions for finding the localities. The first expedition of 3 persons traveled to the localities at the banks of the rivers Irtish, Tobol, Tura by train, buses and mainly by feet, through almost impassable Siberian forests and bogs. We did not find anything in the main parts of the places described in the Soviet paleontologist literature. But we have discovered a lot of unknown localities of the bones of Pleistocene fauna. We found tons of bones, parts of sculls, tusks, teeth of mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, horses, bisons, deers etc.

Generally, the bones are located at the high precipice banks on the bend of the river. Wide terraces, composed by sands, clays, clay sands, loams, are recovered under precipice banks during low water level in autumn. A lot of bones have been found on these terraces. The water erodes the bone-bearing clay-send levels at the river banks during spring high-water, and then the bone sediments settle at the terraces.

Usually among the bones we find the parts of different mammoths, woolly rhinoceros, horses, deers, bisons skeletons. Findings of cave bear, lion or wolf bones are considerably rare. The bones are from the different animals, different sizes, and in some case characterized by the different age. We did not find any original complete skeleton the number of original bones from one animal does not exceed 10% in the accumulation of bones. Nevertheless we select collection of the bones corresponded by size from the tons of excavated material, that allows us to make the skeleton. This composite skeleton is not interested for the paleontologists in mammoth specialization, but it could be useful for general paleontologists and very interesting as historical and aesthetic object.
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• Russian mammoth
• Russian fossils