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Elephants and mastodons

In Egypt, in an oasis in the province of Faiyum, not far from the city of Illahuna (about a hundred kilometers south of Cairo), Lake Birket-Karun glitters in the sun - all that has now survived from the once famous Meridova Lake. Mer-ur - the great channel, they called it in ancient Egypt. A rare ancient writer did not say at least a few words about Mer-ura. And it was famous for its outlandish water gates - locks.

For many miles through the eastern part of the Libyan desert, a canal stretched from the lake to the Nile. During the floods, the Egyptians opened the floodgates, and the Nile water, foaming with whirlpools, flowed into the lake. In drought - from the lake to the Nile. So Meridovo Lake regulated the level of the great river.

On the banks of the Mer-ur, Pharaoh Amenemhet II ordered to build a temple at the entrance to the lake - Lope-ro-unt. Greek: remade Lope-ro-unt into "Labyrinth". It was very easy to get lost in this temple. An intricate mess of passages and passages connected in it three thousand large and small rooms, halls and corridors, ground and underground...

However, this is no longer relevant.

On the northern shore of the former Mer-ur, steep slopes of sandstones and clays rise. At the very beginning of our century, Andrews dug up the bones of a previously unknown animal here. He named it in 1901 meryterium (in honor of Lake Mer-ur).

Meriterium is the oldest of the known ancestors of all representatives of the proboscis order, which includes two still living species of elephants and more than three hundred extinct ones: denatheriums, rhynchotheriums and many other therians, as well as mastodons and mammoths.

Little more than a pig was this ancestor of all the thick-skinned with a trunk. And as clumsy as a pig. Only instead of a pig's snout on his muzzle, a small proboscis rose and slightly hung down - a nose and an upper lip united together. From this "association" a mighty trunk grew in all his evolutionary descendants.

The rudiments of tusks (elongated second incisors) were also present. The upper and lower mini-tusks protruded slightly from the mouth. Like mastodons! After all, almost all of them have four tusks: a pair in the lower and a pair in the upper jaw. The upper ones are larger than the lower ones and in some species reached three meters! For non-specialists, four tusks are the main feature by which it is not difficult to distinguish mastodons from elephants and mammoths (in the last two, only the upper incisors turned into tusks).

You can see this only in the picture: for the mastodons have become extinct. But they died out recently: they still lived in the Pleistocene. And perhaps only a few thousand years ago the last mastodon disappeared from the face of the Earth. They, obviously, were still found in America by the ancestors of the Indians. In any case, in the legends of some Indian tribes, memories of "four-horned bulls" with two tails - in front and behind!

The most ancient and primitive mastodons originated from meriterium in the old ancestral home of all proboscis in Egypt, from where they began long-distance wanderings across all continents. From North Africa they penetrated into Arabia and from there - into Europe. Then - to the east: to Siberia and Mongolia. Through the isthmus at the site of the current Bering Strait, they rushed to North America, from it to South. Only in Australia there were no mastodons.

The journey took millions of years. Along the way, the mastodons changed their appearance and grew: the latest were not lower than an elephant.

The most "wonderful" of the mastodons are shovel-nosed (Pliocene Asian Platybelodons and South American Amebelodons). Their lower tusks closed together. They are expanded, flat, their front ends seem to be cut off. In general, it turned out from the tusks, a shovel. Wielding it, the mastodon dug succulent aquatic plants out of the soft mud. The "shovel" was long!

“It is difficult to imagine a creature with a lower jaw almost equal to the height of an animal ... At the withers, this mastodon reached two and a half meters, and its lower jaw was only fifteen centimeters shorter” (R. Andrews).

In the book All About Strange Animals of Past Times, this researcher told an interesting story about the skeleton of an American mastodon.

It was the first mastodon skeleton assembled almost entirely from the bones of a single animal. The bones were found in 1799 on the farm of D. Martin in the state of New York. They were bought by the American artist C. Peel. They were not enough to complete the set, and he began excavations at the site of the find. His son, R. Peel, mounted the skeleton of the world's first museum mastodon in the Peel Museum in Philadelphia.

In 1850, Peel's museum collection was bought by the Barnum Museum, the owner of the best circus in those days. And then this happened: a year later, the Barnum Museum burned down! They decided that the mastodon skeleton also died in this cook. Irreplaceable loss for science!

And suddenly, a hundred years later, in 1954, a prominent American scientist J. Simpson received a seemingly strange message from the Hessian State Museum in Germany. The curator of this museum asked Simpson to send him photographs of the second mastodon skeleton, also mounted by R. Peel. The first skeleton, located in the Hessian Museum, needed some alterations.

So, as Simpson understood (and understood correctly!), the first skeleton of Peel's mastodon did not die in a fire, but was kept in the Hesse Museum for a century, and none of the scientists knew about it!

And everything turned out like this. Before the fire, the Barnum Museum did not have time to take the bulky skeleton from the Peels. Perhaps they had no intention of handing over their famous mastodon to Barnum at all. One way or another, but this skeleton was sold and resold. To whom he got from the Peels is unknown. Then the French king Louis Philippe bought it for his botanical garden. The amount that was demanded from him for a rare exhibit was considerable: one hundred thousand francs. But the deal did not take place, as there was a revolution, and the king, deprived of the throne, fled from France.

The ill-fated skeleton also visited London. But he didn't stay there for long either. The leaders of the British Museum changed their minds about buying it, as shortly before that they had managed to acquire a more professionally assembled skeleton of the same beast.

No one knows where else the Peel mastodon wandered (and how it did not crumble!) But in the end he ended up in the Hessian Museum, where he is now kept.

The mastodon skeleton found by Warren also traveled a lot. But let's not talk about that. Here is just one interesting fact.

“In the place where (the beast was supposed to have a stomach, they found about 200 kilograms of branches. Most of them are about five centimeters long and some are as thick as a finger. A mass of chewed leaves is mixed with the branches. Obviously, this was the last dinner of the mastodon” ( R. Andrews).

The largest of the proboscis giants was the Pleistocene North American elephant Archidyscodon emperor, whose fossil bones are scattered almost throughout the United States. They were also found in an asphalt "trap" near the La Brea ranch.

The European member of the same genus, the southern European elephant, is believed to have been the ancestor of another Pleistocene European elephant, Paleoloxodon. And he, in turn, gave birth to dwarf, now extinct elephants of Sicily, Malta, Crete and some other islands of the Mediterranean Sea.

However, the second, more prolific branch, coming from the southern elephant, led to parelephas. And from that already there were mammoths. Shaggy inhabitants of the tundra and northern steppes, spread out on the outskirts of glaciers. They lived throughout Europe, most of Asia and North America. Mammoths came to the New World from Asia by the already mentioned road, either connecting Chukotka with Alaska, or descending under the salty waters of the Bering Strait. Many animals moved along this road, known in the world of scientists under the name "Beringia". Although this route was open in both directions, the main migration was from west to east. In the same direction 20 thousand years ago, as already mentioned, people also passed, as they believe, the main culprits of the death of mammoths.

Throughout the Russian North, throughout Siberia and even further - in Manchuria and China, legends about a strange beast - a mole of unprecedented growth - are widespread. It seems to be the size of an elephant and is endowed with horns that act as an earth-digging device. The description of the giant mole named tin-shu, or in-shu (“the mouse that hides”), we find in ancient Chinese books.

"Bun-zoo-gann-mu" is an old Chinese essay about animals, compiled in the 16th century. About tin-shu, its authors write the following: “He constantly stays in caves, looks like a mouse, but reaches the size of a bull. He has no tail, and his color is dark. He is very strong and digs caves for himself in areas covered with rocks and forests.

Another old Chinese book gives interesting details about ting-shu. The giant mole lives in dark and uninhabited countries. His legs are short and he does not walk well. It digs the ground perfectly, however, if it accidentally gets out to the surface, it immediately dies, barely seeing the sun or moon.

And here is an extract from the Manchu annals:

“The animal called fan-shu is found only in cold countries, along the banks of the Tai-shuny-shany river and further to the North Sea.

Fang-shu is like a mouse, but the size of an elephant. He is afraid of the light and lives underground in dark caves. His bones are as white as ivory, and are very easily processed, they do not have cracks. Its meat is cold and very healthy.”

Eskimos from the Bering Strait call this animal Kilu-knuk - Kilu whale.

The sea monster Anglu, with whom he had a fight, threw him out of the sea onto the shore. Kilu-knuk fell to the ground with such force that it went deep into the soil. There he lives to this day, moving from place to place with the help of his fangs, using them like shovels.

Many travelers in Siberia recorded among the Evenki, Mansi, Chukchi and other peoples of our North the same stories about a giant underground inhabitant. All messages are the same. The burrowing animal, even in the most severe frosts, walks back and forth underground. They even seemed to see how the beast, walking underground, unexpectedly approached the surface. Then he hurriedly threw the earth over himself, hurried to dig deeper. The earth, crumbling into a dug tunnel, formed a funnel.

The beast cannot stand sunlight and dies as soon as it comes to the surface. Dead giant moles are most often found in river cliffs, along the slopes of gorges: here the animal inadvertently jumps out of the ground. They die, and getting into the sandy soil: the sands crumble and squeeze the diggers from all sides.

The beast seems to feed on mud, and digs the earth with its horns. He can move them in all directions and even cross them like sabers. The horns look like elephant tusks and are sometimes referred to as teeth. From the horns they make handles for knives, scrapers, and various gizmos.

The horns of the underground giant are mined in the spring, when the ice breaks. During a strong flood, high waters wash away the banks, tear off entire pieces of mountains. Then, when the frozen soil gradually thaws, sometimes whole carcasses of these animals appear on the surface, more often their heads with horns that grow from their mouths. The horns are broken out and sold to Chinese and Russian merchants.

You have probably already guessed what kind of animals we are talking about here? Of course, about mammoths!

After all, it is their tusks and frozen corpses that are found in Siberia. In addition, the very name of the mammoth suggests that the legendary giant mole tin-shu and fan-shu and the Finnish mamut are one and the same creature.

The modern Russian name for mammoth comes from the old Russian word "mamut". The Russians borrowed it from the Finnish tribes that inhabited the European part of Russia. In many Finnish dialects, "ma" is the earth, "mut" in Finnish is a mole.

Therefore, "mamut" - "earthen mole."

So, the legends about a giant beast that clears its way under the ground with its horns, which are very common among the peoples of Siberia in the European North, are generated by finds of mammoth bones. The corpses and tusks of mammoths always lie in the ground, not far from the surface.

Thousands of years ago, a belief was born that these creatures like moles live underground and die as soon as they appear in sunlight. What countless herds of these “moles” graze in the depths of the earth, if mamutes, accidentally falling into the light of day, die here in such a great multitude that tens of thousands of these “horns” were mined here every year in Siberia!

Bones and giant mammoth tusks are still found in various places. In Swabia alone, a small German province (since 1700), the bones of 3,000 mammoths have been found. According to experts, at least 100 thousand more skeletons of prehistoric elephants are hidden in the land of this country.

How numerous "deposits" of mammoths are in some places is shown by the following striking fact: in thirty years, oyster fishers have caught more than 2 thousand molars of mammoths at the bottom of Dogger Bank. So writes the famous paleontologist Professor O. Abel.

But a truly inexhaustible "warehouse" of mammoth bones is Siberia. The New Siberian Islands, for example, are a gigantic mammoth graveyard. In 1700, the merchant Lyakhov, who received the exclusive right to exploit these islands from Catherine II, became rich by exporting ivory from the islands.

Russian traveler Ya. Sannikov reported that the soil of some of the New Siberian Islands consists almost entirely of the bones of fossil elephants. Even the seabed off the coast is overflowing with mammoth tusks. In 1809 Ya. Sannikov brought 250 poods of ivory from the New Siberian Islands. But its reserves did not deplete from this: during the entire last century, from 8 to 20 tons of mammoth tusks were mined annually on the islands.

At the beginning of our century, from Yakutsk alone, an average of 152 pairs of full-weight mammoth tusks were exported annually. It is estimated that over 200 years the tusks of approximately 25 thousand animals have been found here. In total, during this period, Siberia supplied about 60 thousand tusks to the world market. At the end of the last century, Russia provided about 5 percent of the world's ivory production. Although up to 650 tons of ivory tusks were exported from Africa annually, there was not a jeweler in Europe who did not have mammoth ivory mined in the Russian North in stock. Many mammoth tusks were processed locally - in Yakutsk, Arkhangelsk and especially in Kholmogory.

Mammoth tusks, according to many authorities, are often so fresh that they are not inferior in this respect to "ivory freshly brought from Africa." Even the corpses of mammoths, which had lain in ice graves for thousands of years, were preserved so well that when people saw them, they thought they were animals that had recently died.

When naturalists of the 18th century first came across fossilized mammoth bones, they did not dare to think that elephants were once found in Europe, and even more so in Siberia.

Some seriously thought that mammoth bones were the mortal remains of African elephants brought to Europe by the Carthaginian commander Hannibal. The elephants that were in his army allegedly scattered all over Europe, wandered into Siberia and died there from the cold (in fact, almost all of Hannibal's elephants died when crossing the Pyrenees). It was also argued that the bones of mammoths were brought to Siberia from the south during the Flood.

The history of the study of mammoths begins in 1692, when the Russian Tsar Peter I heard from merchants who traveled with goods to China that shaggy brown elephants live in the Siberian tundra. Merchants swore that they themselves saw the head of one of these elephants. Its flesh was half decomposed, but the bones were stained with blood. The king issued a decree on the collection of all material evidence of the existence of these elephants.

In 1724, Russian soldiers found another mammoth head on the banks of the Indigirka. Scientists were most struck by the long brown hair that covered the skin of the Siberian elephant. This means that this is not an African elephant that escaped from Hannibal's army, the skin of African elephants is hairless, but a completely different animal.

In 1799, the German scientist I. Blumenbach, having studied the collected bones and pieces of mammoth skins, gave the animal the Greek-Latin name "Elephas primigenius" - "original elephant".

... In Leningrad, in the Zoological Museum, at the very entrance to the hall, a huge shaggy monster sits. The beast was strongly hunched over, sharply arching its back, as if a terrible weight had fallen on its shoulders. With front legs, massive columns, he leaned heavily on the ground. Long curved tusks protrude from the mouth of the beast, the stump of the tail hangs helplessly down.

Visitors to the museum for a long time crowd around a strange effigy. Its impressive appearance, lively, dynamic posture (it seems that the beast is still alive, stopped for a minute to rest) make a strong impression.

This is the famous Berezovsky mammoth - one of the most valuable fossil finds in the world. The Berezovsky mammoth has an interesting history.

... A long time ago, a shaggy giant was walking along the bank of a small Siberian river, which people later called Berezovka. Shaking his head dejectedly, he chewed on a bunch of grass.

The mammoth did not notice the danger when he stopped under a cliff. Suddenly, with a roar, the shore washed by the rains collapsed and crushed the beast with all its weight. Even his heroic strength was not enough to budge the multi-ton blocks of stones and frozen earth that buried him alive.

Fifteen thousand years later, the Evenk Tarabykin hunted on the banks of the Berezovka (it was in August 1900). The hunter's dogs were hotly following the moose's trail and suddenly stopped. Screeching and wagging their tails, they circled around the old landslide. Tarabykin hurried to them and was dumbfounded: a huge shaggy head looked at him from under the ground. The long trunk rested on the frozen ground in a desperate effort, as if the monster was still trying to get out of the icy grave.

Tarabykin crossed himself in fear and took to his heels.

The Evenks in those days had a belief that the corpses of mammoths bring grief to everyone who sees them. It so happened that at the market in Sredne-Kolymsk, Semyon Tarabykin told the Cossack Yalovaisky about the mammoth he had found. And he knew: for the lifeless, but well-preserved bodies of mammoths, the Academy of Sciences pays money to those who find them.

Yalovaisky asked Tarabykin to show him the way to the "frozen elephant", which he did.

Yalovaisky wrote a letter to the district chief Gorn and attached to him, as material evidence, pieces of skin and wool cut from the head and shoulder of a mammoth. The letter and the package with "material evidence" went through the authorities and finally got to St. Petersburg - to the Academy of Sciences. The Academy immediately equipped an expedition led by a senior member of the Zoological Museum O. Hertz. 163 thousand rubles were allocated for the needs of the expedition.

The detachment sent for the mammoth set off on a journey in early May 1901, and returned ten months later. Through the swamps, through the impassable taiga, moving through the Siberian rivers and mountain ranges, which are stormy in the flood, the expedition members traveled 6,000 kilometers on sledges and 3,000 on horseback. Their incredibly grueling campaign is one of the brightest, selfless feats accomplished in science!

Arriving at the place, on the banks of the Berezovka River, a tributary of the Kolyma, the members of the expedition first of all built a log house for themselves. The same frame was built over the mammoth. He warmed up. The more the mammoth thawed, the more unbearable the disgusting smell of decay became.

For almost two months they dug up and dissected a huge mammoth carcass. From above it was covered with coarse, long reddish-gray hair, under which a thick yellow-brown undercoat was hidden, up to three centimeters long. Under the skin lay a layer of fat up to 9 centimeters thick. And on the back, at the withers, there was a camel-like hump: all of fat! The meat at first seemed quite fresh, dark red in color with white streaks of fat. Looks quite appetizing. But it thawed, immediately became flabby and gray.

The expedition staff initially wanted to cook schnitzel from fresh pieces of meat. But they didn't decide. And they really wanted to taste the meat of an antediluvian beast that had lain in a natural glacier for thousands of years. What does it taste like?

The dogs, however, ate mammoth meat with great appetite, snatching the most tidbits from each other. Unfortunately, they did not respect the historical value and gnawed off the end of the frozen elephant's trunk (according to other evidence, this was done by wolves).

Plants still growing in Siberia were found in the mouth and stomach of the Berezovsky mammoth: northern poppy, buttercup, thyme, sedge, two types of mosses, fir cones, branches of larch and pine - about 15 kilograms of undigested food.

The prepared, cut into pieces mammoth was laid out in linen and leather bags. The cargo turned out to be considerable: 1.6 tons.

Finally, on October 15, 1901, they set off on the return journey. Only in early January we reached Yakutsk, and after 16 days - to Irkutsk. At the end of February 1902, the mammoth, “unmounted” into its component parts, arrived in St. Petersburg.

“There are people who claim that they have ever eaten mammoth meat. A few years ago, at a dinner at the Explorers Club in New York, pieces of this meat, delivered by plane from Alaska, were served as an appetizer” (R. Andrews).

At the end of the last glaciation, a little over a thousand years ago, all mammoths suddenly died out.

How without a trunk: elephants without control Actually, the evolution of an elephant was nothing more than a constant striving for new achievements and subsequent attempts to cope with the consequences of these achievements - until, in the end, it turned out what happened. IN