Discovering the Mammoth

by John J. McKay

  After twenty days of travel in the dead of winter, their caravan reached Urga (modern Ulan Bator, Mongolia), where they were ordered to pause. Word had come from Beijing directing the local governor, the Jiaqing emperor’s brother-in-law, to test Golovkin’s willingness to observe proper court etiquette. Most importantly, they wanted him to perform the kowtow, bowing to ground and touching his forehead there. The request was sprung on him by surprise. The entire embassy was invited to a formal outdoor reception in the morning. The temperature was –35°C, but everyone still showed up in full formal attire. Golovkin was shown a gold screen representing the emperor’s throne and told to perform the kowtow. Like Rezanov in Japan, he indignantly refused. For two hours, he ranted while the rest of the Russians retired to the warmth of their yurts to eat breakfast and eavesdrop. Golovkin said he would only kowtow to the emperor. Apparently, the Chinese authorities did not trust him to do that. Or, maybe they just wanted him to go away. On February 10, 1806, orders arrived from Beijing telling him to leave China. That same day, orders arrived in Canton instructing the local authorities not to allow Krusenstern to trade there, possibly as additional reprimand against the Russian delegation. For Krusenstern, they were too late. He had already sold a load of Alaskan furs and left port the previous day.

  By diplomatic and commercial standards, both missions were failures. But by scientific standards, both were successes. When Krusenstern left Canton, he sailed directly back to Europe by way of South Africa. His scientists had few opportunities for further research, but what they had already done in the South Pacific, Kamchatka, and Japan would fill volumes. Tilesius published a volume of drawings of the flora, fauna, and people of the Pacific that made important contributions to the understanding of all three categories. Bellingshausen published an atlas of the newly explored coasts and islands they had visited. Rezanov studied the Japanese and Polynesian languages.

  When Golovkin was kicked out of Urga, the opportunities for his scientists were just beginning. The embassy disbanded in Irkutsk that March with Golovkin, the dilettantes, and the orchestra heading back to St. Petersburg; the scientists were allowed to stay behind. The credentials given to them by the academy allowed them to work independently of the diplomatic mission. Joseph Rehmann collected medicinal herbs along the Mongolian border. Lorenz Pansner studied mountains in Central Asia. Julius Klaproth, who wrote one of the only accounts of the Golovkin mission, studied the Mongolian, Tibetan, and Buryat languages. One of the questions he asked his new acquaintances was the origin of the word “mammoth” and what they believed about the animal. One story he recorded was that mammoths had been on the ark with Noah. After the Flood, they had tried to move north, but found the waterlogged earth too soft, and sank to their deaths in the mud, which later froze, preserving them. Ivan Redovsky and Mikhail Adams both went north to Yakutsk, hoping to collect plant specimens in the summer. Redovsky traveled east across the Aldan Mountains toward Kamchatka. Adams planned to travel down the Lena River to its delta.

  At some point, after arriving in Yakutsk, Adams met a Mr. Popoff, the head of the merchant’s guild. Popoff must have known that Adams was planning on following the Lena to its delta. When they met, he brought Boltunov’s drawing and description and told him “that they had discovered, upon the shores of the Frozen-Sea, near the mouth of the river Lena, an animal of an extraordinary size: the flesh skin, and hair, were in good preservation, and it was supposed that the fossile production, known by the name of Mammoth-horns (mamontovikost), must have belonged to some animal of this kind.” Adams dismissed the drawing as “very incorrect,” but forwarded it to the academy in St. Petersburg along with a letter explaining his plans to put aside his plant collecting and rush to the delta to see what, if anything, of the mammoth could be salvaged at this late date.

  It took Adams a few days to prepare before he could leave Yakutsk. He needed to secure transportation and supplies. He needed to get his papers in order. He needed to inform the local authorities of his change of plans and convince them that he had permission to do so. He also needed certain letters. The English translation of his account uses the genteel phrase “indispensable letters of introduction.” In fact, these letters would have been no-nonsense orders that gave him the authority to command the assistance of imperial officers and civilians, and to requisition supplies, housing, transportation, and labor with nothing more than a vague promise of later payment. Without these letters, he would only have been able to recover whatever he could personally carry. Where mammoths are concerned, that’s not much. The journey of a thousand miles from Yakutsk to Kumak Surka took three weeks, and Adams reached his destination at the end of June. Bad weather kept him there until August. Adams spent the time studying the people and admiring the landscape. Though he doesn’t mention it in his own account, he must have spent some of the time collecting botanical samples. Another member of the failed China embassy wrote of “a large number of plants, an herbarium sibiricum” from him arriving in Irkutsk during the summer to be forwarded to the academy.

  It was August before Adams could travel to the Bykovsky Peninsula to look at the mammoth site. To follow the Lena to its delta and then follow the coast to the peninsula was a journey well over a hundred miles. Fortunately, there were several overland shortcuts. Shumachov took what was called the deer trail, a straight track across Kharaulakh Ridge, a northern extension of the Verkhoyansk Mountains, then down the Khorogor River, which leads directly to the base of the peninsula. This was not the easiest route, but it was the most direct. The party consisted of Adams; three Cossacks who had come with him from Yakutsk; a merchant named Belkoff, who had carried them down river from the town of Schigansk; Shumachov, leading the way; and ten men from Kumak Surka. They made camp on the hill Kembisagashaeta, directly above the place where the remains of the mammoth lay. From there, Shumachov’s help finding the mammoth was a mere formality; it could be smelled a mile away.

  Adams’s first sight of the mammoth was not encouraging. During the two years since Shumachov had removed the tusks, the carcass had been at the mercy of local scavengers. Most of the flesh and organs were gone, along with the trunk, the tail, and one of the forelegs with the same shoulder blade. Sakha herders, who shared the peninsula with Shumachov’s people, had discovered the carcass and fed its meat to their dogs. But further inspection showed it to be a scientific treasure. Two of the feet were completely intact, with skin and flesh still covering the bones. One eye and the brain had dried up, but were still in place and undamaged by predators. Most of the skeleton was intact, and many of the bones were still held together by ligaments and skin. Even with a leg missing, this was by far the most complete mammoth skeleton ever recovered.

  Adams wasted no time getting the mammoth ready for transport. He made some measurements, then pulled the skin back and disarticulated the skeleton into pieces that could be moved. Next, he had the skin lifted in one piece. It was “of such an extraordinary weight, that ten persons . . . moved it with great difficulty.” He had those ten men spread it out on driftwood to dry. The side of the head facing the ground included the bonus of an intact ear. He reported that the skin was “of a deep grey, and covered with reddish hair and black bristles.” The reddish guard hairs were over two feet in length. Most of the hair had fallen off the skin before Adams arrived and nearly all of the rest fell off when the skin was dried for transport back to St. Petersburg. With the skin drying and the bones ready for transport, Adams dug in the ground underneath and around the mammoth. He was rewarded by finding the missing shoulder blade. Adams carefully gathered all the hair he could find, bagging up over forty pounds.

  With everything packed up for shipping, and Belkoff not having arrived yet with the boat, Adams took a few days to explore the peninsula and make observations on the local geology and botany. Naturally, he collected plant samples, but he also made some offhand observations of the ground that are the best descriptions of permafrost up to that time and that have been completely ignored ever sin
ce. Near one of the small lakes in the peninsula, he examined the cabin of Ivan Bakhov and Nikita Shalaurov, who had stayed there during their unsuccessful attempt to sail from the Lena eastward through the Bering Strait in 1760. He had two giant crosses put up to celebrate the discovery, one for the mammoth and one for himself. At last, Adams tired of waiting for the boat and returned overland to Kumak Surka. The boat with the mammoth remains arrived there a week later.

  Before returning to Yakutsk, Adams boiled the bones to remove the ligaments and clingy bits of skin. This could easily have been the first time that mammoth soup had been made in more than ten thousand years. He does not mention trying it. The only parts that he did not boil were the skull and feet. These he left covered with skin, and they have remained that way to this day. They were dessicated enough that they needed no extra preparation. With the rest of the bones clean and shiny, he packed things carefully into the bottom of the boat for the trip back to Yakutsk. The one disappointment Adams had with the mammoth was that he had not been able to get to it while the tusks were still attached. His disappointment turned to joy in Yakutsk, where Popoff let him know that he still had that very set of tusks and that he was willing to sell them to Adams for a reasonable price. It would be years before anyone would figure out that they came from a completely different, smaller mammoth and that Popoff had swindled Adams. At Yakutsk, Adams repacked the mammoth one last time—this time onto sledges—and sent it off to St. Petersburg. He stayed in Yakutsk for a few more weeks to collect more plants.

  By way of announcing the discovery of the mammoth, the academy published Boltunov’s notes in their Russian-language layman’s gazette, Technological Journal, in November 1806. By then they knew that Adams had recovered a good part of the skeleton and that it was safely en route to St. Petersburg. They planned to reassemble the skeleton for display. For reasons that are unclear, they chose Tilesius for this task. Perhaps, based on the hair sample that he sent to Blumenbach, they thought he had a special interest in mammoths. If so, they would have been wrong. Perhaps they were impressed with his artistic and analytic talents and thought that those would be an advantage when it came to reassembly. Tilesius had been back in the capital since August, having returned aboard Krusenstern’s flagship, the Nadezhda. He had an enormous amount of work to do. He needed to properly organize and store the samples he had collected. He needed to write up and publish descriptions of those items he believed were unknown to European science. He needed to prepare his many illustrations for publication in the official report of the expedition. He was a marine biologist. None of this mattered; the academy wanted him for the job. Having been chosen, he performed the task in a conscientious and creative manner, although with a great deal of grumbling.

  Ninety percent of the reconstruction was not especially difficult. No one doubted that the mammoth was similar in anatomical structure to an elephant. The museum where Tilesius worked, the Kunstkamera, established by Peter the Great for his personal collection of oddities, had the complete skeleton of an Asian elephant for him to refer to. This elephant had been a gift to Peter the Great from the Shah Husayn I of Persia in 1713. He also had Peter Camper’s excellent anatomical study of elephants to give him a crash course in vertebrate anatomy. The missing and most damaged bones were all on the same side of the body, making it easy for the museum’s craftsmen to make replacements by making mirror-image copies of the equivalent bones on the other side of the body. The three problems that faced Tilesius and required informed guesswork were the length of mammoth’s tail; the curve of its spine, that is, its posture; and the correct positioning of its tusks.

  When Boltunov saw the mammoth in March 1804, he saw that it had a short tail, measured it (six vershoks or eleven inches), mentioned that fact in his notes, and included it in his drawing. When Adams saw the mammoth, two years later, the tail was gone and he wrote that he did not believe it had had a tail in life. Inexplicably, the English translation of his account changed that to say he did think that it had a short tail. Tilesius, on examining the skeleton, saw that there had been more vertebrae beyond the hips, thus indicating a tail. If the mammoth was similar to a typical Asian elephant, like the one of Peter’s that he was using a reference, it would have had twenty-four to thirty-three caudal vertebrae. Tilesius guessed that a mammoth’s tail should be shorter than an Asian elephant’s and had the craftsmen make eight vertebrae for the reconstruction. The correct number would have been in the high teens.

  The line of the back was another educated guess. Both of Tilesius’s references—Peter’s elephant and Camper’s monograph—were based on Asian elephants. This would not have bothered him. Based on the study of their molars, it was well established, by his time, that mammoths were more closely related to Asian elephants that to African ones. Tilesius arranged the vertebrae so that the mammoth’s outward silhouette would match the shape of an Asian elephant. The shape of a vertebrate’s back comes from two elements: first, the line of the inner part of the vertebrae themselves, the part that protects the spinal nerve and is the main structural support for the body; and second, the length of the spines that protrude from the upper side of each vertebra and provide a surface for muscles to attach to. The length of these spines is different on mammoths and Asian elephants. To give the mammoth the round shape of an Asian elephant, Tilesius had to flatten out the inner line of the vertebrae. The correct line as we understand it today, which creates the familiar high shoulders and sloping back, would not be known until the middle of the century, when Édouard Lartet discovered a prehistoric drawing of a mammoth on a piece of mammoth’s tusk at the La Madeleine rock shelter in France.

  The last detail that Tilesius had to guess about was the placement of the tusks. No one had yet recovered a mammoth skull with the tusks still attached; the proper placement of them was a mystery. Naturalists who have had the opportunity to examine intact mammoth tusks had all commented on the fact that the curve of them was completely different than that of African or Asian elephants. They curve widely outward as they descend and then inward as they curve up again, and they are much larger than those of any living species of elephant. In the oldest bull mammoths, the tips of the tusks can even cross. The wisdom of the time was that tusks, in any species, are weapons. To this, he added a new rationale; working with the tusks he had, Tilesius believed the tusks had to curve outward or they would have interfered with the mammoth’s vision. With that in mind, he made the same assumption the Boltunov had and mounted the tusks on the wrong sides so that they curved out and back like giant ivory scythes. His mistake would not be corrected by the museum until much later, and scientists would still argue about the details of proper tusk placement well into the twentieth century. For more than a century, no one thought to ask the native ivory hunters how the tusks had been situated in the skull before they broke them out for sale. Because graphic art from the nineteenth century is available in the public domain, art directors for news media and magazines, and even science magazines—which should know better—use scythe-tusked mammoths to illustrate paleontology stories to this day.

  As soon as Boltunov’s notes were published in November 1806, the scientific world eagerly awaited more information. Adams and Tilesius both tried to meet the demand. During the following year, Tilesius and Adams sent copies of Boltunov’s drawing, along with skin and hair samples, to Blumenbach and a half dozen other scientists, mostly German acquaintances of Tilesius’s. Tilesius obtained permission from the academy to crack open one of their other two mammoth skulls and make a brain cast for the Munich anatomist Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring. They also sent samples to their colleagues in Moscow, which must have pleased them, because they replied by offering Adams a teaching position. One relevant person left out of their largesse was Cuvier. The War of the Fourth Coalition, which lasted from summer 1806 until the beginning of 1808, made direct contact with France nearly impossible. But Cuvier was not completely left out of this latest mammoth dialogue. Blumenbach and others kept him up to date
by forwarding information and sharing samples with him. The brotherhood of science trumped politics.

  In August, Adams published an account of his journey to the coast and the recovery of the mammoth in a popular St. Petersburg–based French-language newspaper, Journal du Nord. He sent copies of his account to the geologist Karl Karsten in Berlin, to the German scientific journal Allgemeine Geographische Ephemeriden, and to Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society. The newspaper Berlinische Nachrichten was the first to publish a German translation, a third-person summary, from Karsten’s copy in their October 29 issue. This version was widely reprinted in German and Swiss newspapers. Banks had an English translation made that was published in the Philosophical Magazine for November. This version was widely reprinted in Britain and the United States. Despite having been written in French, the first publication of it in French was a retranslation from Banks’s English version published in Switzerland and Belgium at the end of 1808. Because of the Napoleonic Wars, a version did not appear in France proper until 1810, when a gazette of English literature published Banks’s English translation. That same year a Dutch translation appeared.

  The first mention of Adams’s account in the journal of the French academy was in the notes of the November 30, 1807, meeting, a full year after his own account had appeared in St. Petersburg. Cuvier reported to the academy that Karsten had sent a copy of the Berlinische Nachrichten summary to him and to Bernard-Germain de Lacépède, who chaired the department of reptiles for the National Museum. Cuvier gave an even briefer summary to the members present. After reminding everyone that the proper name for the American mammoth was mastodon, a word he had coined the previous year, Cuvier let them know that he had confidence that this mammoth would confirm his conclusions that the mammoth was a separate species. Even though the German summary had even fewer anatomical details than Adams’s original, one detail excited Cuvier. That was the hair. Fur was a good indication that the mammoth was distinct from living species of elephants. More importantly, Adams mentioned that there were two layers of fur: an outer layer of long, coarse guard hairs and an inner layer of wool. This for him was clear evidence that the mammoth had been native to the north and had not swept there by some geological accident. When he wrote his great work on fossils, Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles (1812), Cuvier quoted from Adams and lengthened his references to Adams and Tilesius in subsequent editions.