Mammoths: Ice Age Giants Exhibition

The preserved body of Lyuba from http://designyoutrust.com/2012/04/baby-mammoth-lyuba-goes-on-display/ originally from Reuters.

On the 3rd August 2014, I visited the Mammoths: Ice Age Giants exhibition at the Natural History Museum, London, which is open until the 7th September 2014. The exhibition was created by the Field Museum, Chicago, and features models of ancient Proboscideans, Pleistocene animals and, the gem of the exhibition, the preserved body of a 35 day old (at death) woolly mammoth, known as Lyuba or Люба, who died around 41,800 years ago on the modern day Yamal Peninsula.  I had read the accompanying book (by Adrian Lister with the same title as the exhibition) beforehand, as research for an essay on extinct Proboscideans, so I went here less for learning new information and more to see, to meet a woolly mammoth, in the flesh. I felt like a pilgrim, visiting the miraculous relics of a saint, in search of enlightenment. I suppose she could be a relic, is a way, for a secular age. A preservation almost as unlikely as the "miraculous" preservation of incorruptible saints, a visitor from an age and a land (in terms of habitat) long gone. I stood in front of her case for a long time. She is remarkable preserved, analogous to ancient Egyptian mummies, but instead of preservation in heat and salt she was preserved in mud and permafrost. She died by suffocation in mud, particles of which were found in her trunk and oesophagus, and you can tell. Her limbs are still in the position she was in when she suffocated, struggling through the mud and her eyes are shut to keep out the mud. It is less a preserved carcass and more of a crime scene, it looks as if she has only recently stopped moving and sunken into the mud. After death, she was rapidly covered in aoxic sediment, so post-mortem decay was negligent. There are some blooms of fungi on the skin; it is signs of the decay which occurred after she weathered out of the permafrost and before refrigerator and preservation by researchers. It is so strange that, around 4,000 years since the very last woolly mammoth died and decayed, mammoths put in "suspended animation" in permafrost still have enough biological material for fungi to grow upon, just as they grow upon a freshly dead elephant. Her trunk is different to that of modern elephants, it had two "fingers" on what would be the top of the nose and the upper lip (?) either side of the nostrils, which are very long and would have been very sensitive, used for the sort of fine motor movements that her feet could never manage. She is hairless, mostly, purely because of the conditions she was buried in, but there is some traces of hair and I saw some on the fold behind her knee. She shrunk after death, down to 50kg when she was found from about 100kg in life due to dehydration; her skin is wrinkled and loose, from one angle you can see her rib cage through the skin. I spent a long time circling her, and I almost felt like crying at the beauty and wonder of it, a visitor from a past age, a lost earth.
As you can see, I got rather too attached to a dead mammoth, but there was the rest of the exhibition to see too. I couldn't take pictures of Lyuba, but here are some pictures of the rest of it. It was very crowded, mostly with families with small children, and became a bit of an Ice Age "selfie safari", but when you could get close to the exhibits it was very good. It did such a good job of highlighting the importance of studying paleontology with a final exhibition on the efforts to prevent the extinction of modern elephants. In mammoths we have a very good model of the extinction which could (is?) facing their proboscidean cousins, the modern elephants. If we had no idea of the past, we can not prepare for and predict the future and this applies in all fields of biology, geography and geology.

The Proboscideans 

This is a model of Moertherium, one of the earliest Proboscideans. It was around the size of a large pig, and was probably largely aquatic, as was some of it's most recent ancestors. Small "tusks" are visible in the upper jaw. 

The fossilized jaw of this blogs name sake, Amebelodon. Amebelodon lived from around 15 to 5 million years ago and had two pairs of enlarged incisors (tusks). The tusks of the lower jaw became flattened and broad, until they nearly touched. These tusks were probably used to "mow" down tough grasses, by moving it's head from side to side like a scythe. 

Left Pygmy Mammoth jaw bone and Right Woolly Mammoth jaw bone. The Pygmy Mammoth is an example of island dwarfism, whereby animals stranded on an island speciate and become smaller, due to a lesser need for scarcer food and lack of predators which they need to be big to defend themselves against. The Pygmy Mammoths evolved after a population of Columbian Mammoths became isolated on the Californian Channel Islands, and was around 1.72m at the shoulder, in contrast to the Columbians at 4.3m at the shoulder. 

A life-sized model of a Pygmy Mammoth, with a mastodon at the front on the background.

A cast of the "Hyde Park Mastodon", an American Mastodon skeleton that was found in New York State and is a 95% complete skeleton. The teeth are clearly visible, which is what the Mastodon ("breast teeth") is named after.

A model of a Columbian Mammoth. Columbian Mammoths occupied some southerly regions of North America, including Mexico and was largely confined to grassland habitats. It existed at the same as the American Mastodon in North America, though as Mastodons probably stuck to swampy habitat they probably did not meet often.

Rest of the museum:

The Skull of a Stegodon, a fairly distant relative of the modern elephants, though due to similarities in habitat they resemble each other, an evolutionary process known as analogy. The tusks grew close to each other, so the trunk would not be able to go between the tusks, but rather hung down on either side of the tusks.

Gomphotherium skull. The Gomphotheriums had four pairs of long tusks, and is one of the earliest examples of sequential tooth development, whereby the cheek teeth of the animal erupt from the back throughout the animal's life to replace those which are worn out. Gomphotherium had a total of three molars in each side of each jaw at one time, and would have had six teeth "pass through" each side in it's lifetime. This became more extreme in mammoths and elephants, who have only one molar in each side of each jaw at one time.

Deinotherium skull, which had only had one pair of lower tusks, and these were probably used to scrap bark which they would have eaten. The trunk would have hung down in front of the lower tusks, and would only be visible when it raised it's trunk.  

Architecture 

The museum was built to house the Natural History Department of the British Museum, so it is laced with all sorts of natural historical details in the architecture. 

A carved ammonite centre, and what looks a bit like an Ediacaran animal, on the right (?), in the bird gallery. 

Carved sea-scorpion in the geology gallery. 

Carved lobed fish on a pillar in the geology gallery.