Adams mammoth
Encyclopedia
Woolly mammoth
The woolly mammoth , also called the tundra mammoth, is a species of mammoth. This animal is known from bones and frozen carcasses from northern North America and northern Eurasia with the best preserved carcasses in Siberia...
skeleton, with skin and flesh still attached, to be recovered by European scientists. The mammoth remains were discovered in 1799 in northeastern Siberia
Siberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...
by Ossip Shumachov, an Evenki
Evenks
The Evenks are a Tungusic people of Northern Asia. In Russia, the Evenks are recognized as one of the Indigenous peoples of the Russian North, with a population of 35,527...
hunter. In 1806, Mikhail Adams
Johann Friedrich Adam
Johann Friedrich Adam, later called Michael Friedrich Adams was a botanist from St. Petersburg, Russia....
journeyed to the location and collected the remains.
The first published reports of Siberian mammoth remains appeared in Europe in the 1690s. In 1728, Sir Hans Sloane
Hans Sloane
Sir Hans Sloane, 1st Baronet, PRS was an Ulster-Scot physician and collector, notable for bequeathing his collection to the British nation which became the foundation of the British Museum...
published what can be considered the first comprehensive scientific paper on mammoths in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society is a scientific journal published by the Royal Society of London. It was established in 1665, making it the first journal in the world exclusively devoted to science, and it has remained in continuous publication ever since, making it the world's...
. Sloane's paper was based on travellers' descriptions and a few scattered bones collected in Siberia and Britain. While he discussed the question of whether or not the mammoth was an elephant, he drew no conclusions. In 1738, Johann Philipp Breyne
Johann Philipp Breyne
Johann Philipp Breyne , son of Jacob Breyne , was a German botanist, palaeontologist, zoologist and entomologist. He is best known for his work on the Polish cochineal , an insect formerly used in production of red dye...
argued that mammoth fossils represented some kind of elephant, but could not explain why a tropical animal would be found in such a cold area as Siberia; he suggested that they might have been transported there by Noah's flood. Between 1692 and 1806, only four descriptions of frozen mammoths—skeletons with skin and flesh still attached—had been published in Europe. None of the remains of those five were recovered and no complete skeleton recovered during that time. By the end of the century, based on this partial data, Georges Cuvier
Georges Cuvier
Georges Chrétien Léopold Dagobert Cuvier or Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier , known as Georges Cuvier, was a French naturalist and zoologist...
was able to argue conclusively that the Siberian mammoth was a different species than either of the two known species of elephant[6]. This was the state of affairs when Adams heard about Shumachov's discovery.
Adams had come to Siberia in 1805 as part a scientific team attached to Count Yury Golovkin's unsuccessful diplomatic mission to China. After the failure of the mission, several members of the scientific team stayed on in Siberia to conduct research. While in Yakutsk at the beginning of the summer of 1806, Adams heard from an ivory merchant about the frozen mammoth discovered near the Lena Delta
Lena River
The Lena is the easternmost of the three great Siberian rivers that flow into the Arctic Ocean . It is the 11th longest river in the world and has the 9th largest watershed...
. He hired four cossacks and sailed down the Lena to the delta. At the end of June, he arrived in Shumachov's village and, at the end of July, Adams, Scumachov, and ten men from Shumachov's village journeyed to the mammoth's location.
At first, Adams was disappointed to discover that wild animals had eaten most of the organs and flesh of the mammoth (including the trunk). However, he forgot his disappointment after examining the carcass and realizing that what was left would still be, by far, the most complete mammoth ever recovered. All in all, Adams recovered the entire skeleton, minus the tusks, which Shumachov had already sold, and one foreleg; most of the skin, which he described as "of such an extraordinary weight, that ten persons ... moved it with great difficulty;" and nearly forty pounds of hair. During his return voyage he purchased a pair of tusks that he believed were the same tusks that Shumachov had sold.
In St. Petersburg, the task of reassembling the skeleton was given to Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius. Tilesius' task was made easier by the fact that the Kunstkamera
Kunstkamera
The Kunstkamera was the first museum in Russia. Established by Peter the Great and completed in 1727, the Kunstkammer Building hosts the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, with a collection of almost 2,000,000 items...
, the museum established by Peter the Great, contained the skelton of an Indian elephant that Tilesius was able to use as a reference. Tilesius had wooden replicas made to replace the missing leg bones. His reconstruction was one of the first attempts a reconstructing the skeleton an extinct animal. While most of the reconstruction is correct, Tilesius made a glaring error by mounting the tusks on the wrong sides so that they curved outward instead of inward. The error was not corrected until 1899 and the correct placement of mammoth's tusks would still be a matter of debate into the twentieth century.
Adams' account of his journey was published in late 1807 and soon translated into other European languages and circulated throughout Europe and the Americas. Tilesius made a set of etchings of his reconstruction and sent them other naturalists to examine while he worked on a detailed report of the skeleton which was finally published in 1815.
The Adams mammoth is sometimes incorrectly referred to as "Adam's Mammoth". This appears to be a folk etymology, based on the idea that this was the "first" mammoth, like Adam
Adam
Adam is a figure in the Book of Genesis. According to the creation myth of Abrahamic religions, he is the first human. In the Genesis creation narratives, he was created by Yahweh-Elohim , and the first woman, Eve was formed from his rib...
.