More than 50 years ago, when the International Geological Congress was held in Moscow, the Soviet Union, the organizer used Mammoth as a research topic. Since then, the Mammoth has broken out of the ancient biological world and become a news subject that often appears in the press. So, what kind of animal was a Mammoth?

According to the joint research of geologists and paleontologists, about 200,000 years ago, the earliest Mammoth appeared with the arrival of the last great ice age in geological history. Its footprint has been throughout the northern parts of Eurasia and North America. It was not until 10,000 years ago that it became extinct as the glaciers retreated. It is found in the cold Siberian region of its fossil remains buried the most abundant, it is estimated that there are more than 25,000, of which the flesh has not yet decomposed, and even can see the shape of the body, up to 25.

From these rare files, we can roughly know that it was more than 6 meters long, more than 4 meters high, and the large tusks on its mouth were more than 1.5 meters long, and it is estimated that its total body weight when it was alive was more than 5 tons. A few huge ones, and probably more. This is because a single ivory weighing 400 kilograms, 4.5 to 5 meters long, has been found.

On the body that has not yet festered, people can also see that it is covered with thick brown fine hair (about 2.5 cm long) and longer coarse hair (about 9 cm long). Under the skin, a thick layer of fat is stored. It can be seen that Mammoths are cold-loving animals that live and reproduce in the cold environment.

Why are the mammoth remains preserved well (flesh not yet rotting)? Geologists and paleontologists have proposed various explanations.

The most common theory is that they grow in the frozen tundra on the edge of the glacier, and during the summer season, they sometimes walk on the glacier and accidentally fall into the crevasse that is frozen by the thin ice on the surface, so that they are isolated from the rest of the world as if they were in a huge icehouse. It wasn’t discovered until the weather warmed up and the glaciers melted, so the fur remained and the muscle was edible.

However, this claim does not stand up to close scrutiny.

First, if the mammoth fell into the crevasses and starved to death due to lack of food. However, freezing experiments have shown that when muscle is slowly frozen, the water in the cells will form large crystals, the cells will be swollen and cracked, and the muscle will gradually rot, so that it is impossible to eat.

Second, if the mammoth fell into the crevasses, the strata and rocks that buried it would have been glacial deposits – very mixed deposits of rock and mud. But the layer where the mammoths were found buried was a layer of silt, or more specifically, sapropelic soil high in organic matter.

In addition, according to the geological and geomorphologic characteristics of Siberia for hundreds of thousands of years, it can be confirmed that in the era of mammoth survival, there was no glacier in the plain area, and only valley glaciers appeared in the high mountains, and the mammoth fossils were buried in the plain area. More paradoxically, a mammoth larva was found in Siberia in 1976 alongside wild horses and giant tigers; Fossils of bison, wolves, and mountain lions have also been found in comparable formations in Alaska, but they are not typical cold-loving animals, that is, they lived in an environment that had little to do with glaciers.

So it was suspected that mammoths did not necessarily live in the frozen tundra, but might have lived in the cold grasslands farther south. It was discovered after being buried and washed downstream by rivers flowing to the Arctic Ocean. However, many mammoth skeletons are intact, showing no signs of being washed away by the flowing water, and someone are standing (such as the one found at the end of the Bereshsovka River in Siberia in 1900, now on display at the St. Petersburg Zoological Museum), and do not appear to have been hit by the current. Another large number of mammoth fossils were found not in the river, but in the “interriver region” between the two rivers. Therefore, the idea of “alluvial burial” is also difficult to accept

The cause of the mammoth’s death became a mystery, so people made two more hypotheses:

Is it the shifting of the earth’s poles? It means that the place where mammoths originally lived was not very cold, and the location where mammoth fossils were found was mostly near the polar circle and outside, which was due to the pole shift of the Earth’s axis. But paleomagnetic data can’t prove that the Earth’s axis changed around the time mammoths lived until today. Astronomers and geophysicists also believe that a sudden shift in the rotation of the Earth’s axis would be so powerful that the added pressure would be enough to tear the crust apart.

Is it continental drift? Mammoths did not live in ice and snow, but were active further south than the Arctic Circle is today. Only continental drift has shifted its burial place (where it once lived) closer to the polar circle. However, the study of modern Marine geology tells us that the current rate of seafloor expansion and continental drift is about 5 centimeters per year, and for various reasons, some will be slower, and it is doubtful whether they can move such a long distance within tens of thousands of years.

How do paleontologists think in the face of these conflicting mysteries? Based on characteristics of the mammoths themselves, such as thick downy and coarse hair, thick subcutaneous adipose tissue, and food scraps taken from the mouths, teeth, and stomach sacs of many undecayed mammoth carcasses, they insist that they grew on the tundra and were buried in situ. In particular, mammoths discovered in 1972 on the right bank of the middle Sandrin River northeast of Yakutsk, Siberia, from the anatomy of frozen internal organs, their main diet (more than 90%) was herbs – grass and cattails, leaves, alder, willow and possibly birch young leaves; As well as strawberry leaves and moss. Of particular interest is the goldilocks, an herb that still grows on the tundra and blooms when there is more water and sunshine in summer (above about 5 ° C). Analysis of the food residue found no mature seeds (or spores) of the plant, suggesting that the mammoth died at the height of summer.

So a new question was raised: Why did the mammoths die in the summer, when temperatures and food were good for them? At the same time, modern cold experiments have proved that only under quick-freezing conditions, frozen meat can be eaten, by inference, mammoths must be frozen to death, otherwise there will be no “frozen meat”. So, how to explain the mystery of quick freezing?

In recent years, explorers traveling in the Arctic have seen such unexpected scenes: at the end of summer and the beginning of winter, the frozen tundra is in a period of herbaceous bloom, and the goldroads are thriving. Suddenly a black cumulus cloud rises from the horizon, the temperature drops sharply, and a biting cold current sweeps through. Within a few hours, the calm and colorful wilderness became a raging land, and the cold and terrible world – the temperature suddenly dropped from above 5 ° C to below 0 ° C, or even nearly 100 ° C.

Inspired by this, it is expected that a similar quick-freezing scene would occasionally occur during the life of the mammoth, and if it happened to be caught in a sinking frozen cave or mire, this disaster could kill it in an instant. First, the lungs become cold, and then the blood clots, perhaps freezing a “dying” mammoth into a solid statue in a matter of hours. So the giant elephant is inside a huge natural freezer.

At the same time, oil drilling in the Arctic frozen region has also found that there is still a low temperature refrigeration effect at a depth of 1,000 meters below the surface. And deep permafrost melts very slowly, such as a small patch of permafrost from the last ice age found in a crater in Hawaii. In the Arctic, the thaw is naturally occurring more slowly. This discovery provides geological evidence to explain why mammoth muscles with “frozen meat for thousands of years” were edible.

One final question remains; Where does the cold snap that causes the flash freeze come from? I can only guess at this point: Perhaps due to the violent collision of two major plates on the Earth’s crust, resulting in a sudden eruption of volcanoes, a hot gas straight into the upper atmosphere, at this time, immediately into an incredible low temperature, and then in the upheaval to the poles of the Earth spiraling down to the warmer layer of air, when it passes through the warm layer, into an extremely violent wind, blowing to the ground at high speed. Strong winds everywhere, the cold hit, the extreme low temperature, completely can make the mammoth frozen to death.

Some foreign geologists, according to the characteristics of cyclical climate change, even predict that in the next few thousand years, there will be a little ice Age coming, by then, the current London, Berlin, New York will also enter the ice world, who knows what other animals will meet the fate of mammoths!

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