The ivory king : $b A popular history of the elephant and its alliesHolder, Charles Frederick
History
The ivory king : $b A popular history of the elephant and its allies
Holder, Charles Frederick
Elephants
The mammoth may rightly be considered the king of all elephants, and in
general appearance it much resembled the African species. The full adult
may have been a third more bulky than the largest existing elephants,
and undoubtedly weighed at least twice as much. To protect them from
the cold, they were covered with hair, which gave them a ferocious
appearance. The hair was of three kinds: first there was a thick coat
of reddish wool; over this grew a coat of long, thick hair; while upon
the neck was a heavy mane. The tusks of the mammoth were enormous: some
measured thirteen feet in length; and, curved in a circle, gave the
animal a strange and formidable appearance.
While the mammoth greatly resembled the African elephant, there are some
points of difference. The skull is narrower at the summit, and the molar
teeth have great breadth of crown as compared to the length: the ridges
also are narrow and crowded, while the enamel is thin and straight, the
crimping that is seen in others being absent. The molars number, as in
other elephants, eight, at one time present; or, one and a portion of
another one each side of both jaws.
This huge elephant flourished principally in the far North; and, as its
remains are now found in the greatest abundance on the shores of the
Arctic Sea, it must have existed in vast herds. The majority of specimens
discovered are buried in the soil, that is now frozen the year round in
a solid mass for many feet. The finest specimen known is a skeleton in
the museum at St. Petersburg; the original having been discovered in
1799 by a poor fisherman named Schumachoff, a Tongoose, who every spring
followed down the Lena River that led into the Arctic Sea. One day while
engaged in following his vocation, he observed on the side of a tundra a
shapeless mass, appearing like some huge monster entombed. The following
year he returned to the same locality, and found that the object had
weathered out still more, and was a mammoth—a veritable frozen giant.
Still, he could not claim the fine tusks; and another year passed, and
then his family were so superstitions that they refused to consent to
his again visiting the strange animal that he had described. But finally,
five years after his first trip, he determined to again visit the scene
of his discovery. He sailed down the river in his small boat, and,
with mingled emotions of fear and curiosity, approached the imprisoned
monster. Raising his eyes on reaching the spot, he saw a great cavity in
the cliff, but the mammoth was gone. The ice had melted away, but beneath
where the giant had rested lay the enormous body. The tusks were still
intact; and Schumachoff carried them South in triumph, where he realized
fifty rubles from the sale, leaving the body—which, wonderful to relate,
was as fresh as if the animal had died only a week before—to the bears
and wolves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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