Siberian Permafrost Yields Mammoth Find for Scientists

Scientists said Wednesday that they had dug a woolly mammoth from the Siberian permafrost and transported it, virtually intact and still frozen, to a laboratory for study.

They used radar to “see” the mammoth in its icy grave, then excavated a huge block of frozen dirt around it to preserve the 23,000-year-old creature.

“It is the first time that a mammoth carcass from the permafrost of Siberia has been excavated under such cold conditions,” said Dutch paleontologist Dick Mol in a telephone news conference.

“This is a dream for me--to find the soft parts and touch them and even smell them. It’s very exciting.”

The paleontologists, led by French explorer Bernard Buigues, were directed to the site by local residents who found a tusk sticking up from the ground.

The scientists dug up the head, which had partially thawed and decayed, and decided to stop digging for fear of destroying their find.

After using ground-penetrating radar to locate the carcass, they used jackhammers to break up the frozen soil, which was as hard as concrete. They dug a trench around the mammoth and then tunneled underneath before breaking it free.

On Sunday, a helicopter lifted the 22-ton block of frozen dirt and flew it 150 miles to Khatanga, Russia. It is being kept in an ice cellar.

“In April, we will return to Khatanga,” Mol said. They will use a rack of hair dryers to thaw out the block, layer by layer, and examine every speck of plant matter and animal remains they can find in the soil surrounding the mammoth. The animal can be smelled when the surrounding permafrost is melted.

Alexei Tikhonov of the Zoological Institute in St. Petersburg had earlier stressed that the mammoth carcass was not complete.

But he and Buigues said the science behind the expedition was more important. “I will be proud if we have only 85% or 90% of the mammoth,” Buigues said.

The mammoth, dubbed “Zharkov” after the local man who first discovered its tusk in 1997, was a 9-foot-tall adult male, about 47 years old at the time of death, that would have looked like a hairy elephant to the modern eye.

Tikhonov disputed claims that the mammoth could be cloned because during its “preservation in permafrost, dehydration destroyed the chains of DNA. Now we only have very small parts of the DNA chains.”