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- The carcass of a woolly mammoth, kept
out of rot's way for 20,000 years in the frozen ground of northern Siberia,
will be excavated this autumn.
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- The Jarkov mammoth, named for the family
that discovered it, will be the first mammoth ever to be kept frozen as
it's lifted out of its grave. It will be stored in an underground cave
at minus twelve degrees centigrade.
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- First details of the excavation were
given by Bernard Buigues and Dick Mol at the 2nd International Mammoth
conference this week in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
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- Buigues, a professional explorer, planned
the excavation after hearing of two huge tusks found in the far north of
the Taymir Peninsula of Siberia. He will be joined by French, Russian and
Dutch researchers, with financial backing from Discovery Channel, which
is shooting a documentary of the undertaking, to be broadcast in March
2000.
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- "It will be very interesting,"
comments Sergey Vartanyan, project scientist of the Wrangel Island State
Reserve, another area where important mammoth remains have been discovered.
"There have been many mammoth finds in Siberia, of course, but with
a carcass in good condition, more than just the bones, you can do much
more science."
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- According to Buigues, earlier finds of
mammoths in the permafrost had always been excavated in the summer, when
the top layer of the permafrost melts and can be sucked away with big pumps.
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- "The Russians were only interested
in the bones; everything else was thrown away," Buigues says. For
that reason, actual samples of mammoth hair, skin and flesh are very rare.
With such samples, DNA analysis could shed more light on the relationship
between existing and extinct species, he says.
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- Last summer, researchers analyzed the
mammoth's skull, which was badly damaged by the removal of the tusks, but
still had intact jaws. A study of the teeth revealed the mammoth was an
adult male.
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- If, as is assumed, woolly mammoths lived
as long as African elephants, their close relatives, and if their teeth
wore down at the same rate, then this one was 47 years old.
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- This autumn, Buigues and his team will
cut into the permafrost around the animal and a helicopter will lift it
to its new burial site, a cave in Khatanga on the Taymir peninsula.
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