WOOLLY MAMMOTH SKULL Mammuthus primigenius Late... Lot 2

WOOLLY MAMMOTH SKULL Mammuthus primigenius Late Pleistocene (-50,000/-10,000 years) Russia H. 120 - W. 135 - D. 165 cm Provenance : - Inter - Mammoth Ltd, Moscow - Italian private collection The woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), an extinct species closely related to the elephant, was characterized by a mantle composed of three different layers of hair, a small trunk and two long, curved tusks that spiraled in opposite directions and continued to curve until the tips converged, sometimes crossing each other. The imposing size and particular shape of the tusks have given rise to much debate: it is likely that they were used in intraspecific fights or to attract females and intimidate rivals. Because of their curvature, the tusks were not adapted for stabbing, but they may have been used for percussion, as indicated by the lesions on some fossil shoulder blades. Woolly mammoth tusks were traded in Asia long before Europeans became aware of them. Güyük, the 13th-century Khan of the Mongols, is said to have sat on a throne made of mammoth ivory. From the 19th century onwards, woolly mammoth ivory became a highly prized and popular product, used as a raw material for many products and providing a sustainable alternative to elephant ivory. When the idea of the existence of large elephants began to spread in Europe, some believed they were the remains of elephants that had escaped from the army of Hannibal and Pyrrhus of Epirus while crossing the Swiss Alps, others that they had been transported from the tropics to the Arctic by the biblical universal flood. In 1722, Peter the Great of Russia began subsidizing scientific expeditions to try and recover at least one specimen, but it wasn't until 1799, near the Lena delta, that Siberian hunter Ossip Schumachov finally found a mammoth engulfed in ice. Fascination with this extinct animal persists to this day, so much so that several private and public groups in the USA and Russia are attempting to revive the species through cloning procedures using samples frozen in the permafrost.