French scientists Yves Coppens, top, and Bernard Buigues, right, pose with Dungan Guenady Jarkov and the tusks of what is believed to be a 23,000 year-old woolly mammoth in this picture made in early October 1999. The tusks are from the body of an ancient woolly mammoth preserved in the ice in the Taimyr Peninsula, Siberia, Russia. ASSOCIATED PRESS

Frozen mammoth airlift milestone in paleontology, scientists say

Web posted October 23, 1999

By Marilyn August
Associated Press

PARIS -- The pungent smell of elephant dung pierced the Siberian cold as scientists scraped away the last layers of frozen tundra that had entrapped a woolly mammoth for 20,000 years.

``It was like walking into the stall at the zoo where the elephants sleep -- suddenly you could smell their breath, their dung and urine,'' recalled Dick Mol, a Dutch scientist who helped excavate the nearly perfectly preserved adult male mammoth.

Five days after airlifting the frozen hulk of the world's first intact mammoth carcass to the Siberian town of Khatanga, the team of paleontologists said Friday their find could lead to a breakthrough in cloning an animal that has been extinct for 10,000 years.

``It's a question of getting quality DNA,'' Yves Coppens, a French paleontologist, told a news conference at the College de France.

The French-led team -- which also includes members from the United States, Netherlands and Russia -- must now thaw the 23-ton carcass without destroying its soft tissue, skin and internal organs, Coppens said.

``I'm sure there will be some very exciting surprises,'' he said, adding that molecular biologists and parasitologists were on hand to take specimens from internal organs.

Studying the beast's teeth and tusks, the team determined that it was an 11-foot-tall male who died at age 47 near a watering hole on the remote Taimyr Peninsula. It has been named Jarkov for the family who discovered it while herding reindeer in 1997.

The project was partly funded by the Discovery Channel and the French magazine Paris Match, said French paleontologist Bernard Buigues, who oversaw the airlift. Other private sources also contributed, but Buigues declined to identify them or say how much the project cost.

Coppens said he thought the prospects for cloning were poor because the temperature in the ice cellar where scientists will gradually thaw the mammoth out for study are too warm to preserve the DNA needed for cloning. Team members say DNA can survive at temperatures of minus 22 degrees or lower, while the ice cellar temperature will kept at between minus 14 degrees and 4 degrees.

Some scientists have suggested using frozen sperm from Jarkov to try to breed it with elephants -- considered cousins of the mammoth.

But some on the team remained cautious.

``The mammoth could perhaps be cloned in 15 to 20 years, but I remain skeptical of cloning because its natural environment has disappeared,'' Mol said. ``If it were cloned, there's no place on Earth it could survive.''

On Sunday, workers using jackhammers chopped the still-frozen behemoth from the rock-hard permafrost. The carcass was then harnessed to a helicopter and flown about 150 miles south to an airstrip in Khatanga.

``My heart was in my mouth because at first, the helicopter just couldn't lift off, and it dragged the carcass across the snow for about 50 yards,'' Buigues recalled, rubbing his fingers, still numb and swollen from working without gloves in minus 4 degree temperatures.

Buigues said the mammoth was being kept in sub-zero temperatures in a roped-off area of the Khatanga airstrip and would be moved to the ice cellar in mid-November.

There it will be thawed using a hair dryer, he said. The mammoth was virtually intact, except for its head, which was exposed to air as the top layers of permafrost melted over the millennia.

Though much of the project's funding has come from the West, the mammoth will remain in Russia, where it will eventually go on display in a cold museum planned for next door to the Khatanga research center.

Buigues said native hunters and fishermen have spotted at least six more sites where carcasses of mammoths, wolverines, primitive horses, rhinoceroses and sheep may be entombed in the region.

``We hope to excavate them all, put them on display in a cold museum where all the data on these species can be centralized,'' he said. Some future finds may be permitted to leave Russia, which has strict laws against exporting scientific artifacts.

After studying fossilized mammoth remains for 30 years, U.S. mammoth expert Larry Agenbroad, of Northern Arizona University, said it was ``fantastic'' to pet the mammoth's fur.

Mol was just as excited, saying the project was ``a dream come true.''

``The quality of the tusks was so fresh that it looked like the mammoth was living yesterday, and when I rubbed my hand across the thick layers of warm fur, it was like touching a furry, live animal,'' he said.