This story, which is nonfiction, was written during a visit to Russia in September 1993 and accepted by the St. Petersburg Press (now the St. Petersburg Times). I don't know if it ever ran, because I couldn't stick around to see it through. If it did, they owe me twenty dollars. SAVING THE MAMMOTHSST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA -- In his low-ceilinged office in the bowels of the Zoological Museum, Dr. Gennady Baryshnikov pulls clumps of strawlike brown mammoth hair from a cardboard box. The catacombs of the museum contain hundreds more specimens not displayed to the public. Bones as thick as tree trunks, skulls almost too heavy to lift, and boxes of teeth and fragments crowd the dusty shelves, while samples of soft tissue like intestines and muscles float in jars of alcohol. These revolting relics of extinct woolly elephants could help scientists unravel the mysteries of climatic change and evolution, explains the grey-bearded Dr. Baryshnikov, who heads the mammoth research team at the Zoological Institute attached to the museum. Some of the samples contain shreds of DNA that might be replicated and recombined through genetic engineering, eventually producing a living mammoth. "We hope that one day in the future the American movie Jurassic Park can become a reality," Baryshnikov says. Pleistocene Park, perhaps. While scientists in the American movie revived dinosaurs from the Jurassic period, mammoths lived in the later Pleistocene and Holocene periods, overlapping with early man. Some were frozen alive and preserved in landslides in Siberia, with their skin, fur, eyes and meat still clinging to the bones.
Ever since the Imperial Academy of
Sciences organized the first
trip to unearth a mummified mammoth in
1901, the Zoological
Institute has been the world headquarters for
analysis of mammoth
remains. But as methods of analysis have advanced,
research
funding for Russian scientists has been cut off. Since the
1991
coup, the government has paid only salaries to the team of eight
paleontologists at the Institute. "There is no money for
microscopes, no money for computers," says Baryshnikov. The
last
expedition to retrieve a complete mammoth took place in
1988, yielding
a slightly rotted baby female named Masha by the
scientists. They were
able to study Masha's remains only by
flying her to Japan and
collaborating with Japanese biologists.
The team used X-rays and CAT
scans to probe Masha's innards, and
built a computer simulation of how
her heart pumped. They also
extracted pieces of DNA from her cells,
but could not recover
complete chromosomes. To begin to clone a
mammoth, a fresher
specimen than Masha would be needed, Baryshnikov
says. Ideally,
the earth around it would be carved out and the entire
frozen
lump transported to a laboratory. Past specimens like Masha
have
been removed by flushing them with water, a method that is
cheaper but more destructive to the soft tissues. Occasionally, the scientists must try
to buy
specimens. This year, a trader offered the museum an unusual
tusk, 108 kg in weight and 3 m in length. The government made a
special grant of $15,000 for its purchase. Otherwise, it probably
would have been exported and carved up for souvenirs, Baryshnikov
explains. The rough, curved tusks, built up by layers over the
animal's life, reveal its age and diet. Surveys of thousands of
tusks
show that the climate of Northern Siberia must once have
been as rich
as the African savanna, Baryshnikov says. Data from
the past could
help predict the future climate, he adds. Because
climatic change is a
global phenomenon, Baryshnikov believes the
fate of woolly mammoth
research is an international problem. His
group has joint research
agreements with scientists at Tokyo
Jikei University of Medicine and
the University of Tokyo, under
Dr. Naoki Suzuki, and researchers at
the Illinois State Museum
under Dr. Larry Agenbroad and Dr. Jeffrey
Saunders. |
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