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What a lovely baby!
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What a lovely baby! The world’s only complete woolly mammoth tells a complex tale, finds Shaoni Bhattacharya bear on its hind legs on one side increasing frequency of finds like and a prowling sabre-toothed cat Lyuba makes the exhibition on the other. Round the corner, especially timely. there is more terror as a spiralHe hopes visitors will also tune tusked Columbian mammoth, in to the exhibition’s other big a giant among giants at 4 metres message. In a video installation in high, towers over all comers. one of the rooms, Lister connects Clearly, the NHM is poised to the extinction of mammoths with repeat its feat of producing showstoppers in exhibitions telling the “Habitat loss plus hunting could be a story of our not-too-distant past. lethal combination for As palaeontologist Adrian Lister, modern elephants too” the NHM’s scientific adviser on the exhibition, explains, the aim is to get more people excited the fate of the elephant – over about the ice age mammals who 20,000 of which are thought to disappeared relatively recently. have been killed illegally last year. Of course, the blockbuster Lister explains that climate approach may blind visitors to the change could be to blame for the science underpinning such shows. mammoths’ demise, as their That would be a shame, since range shrank when grassland there is much research into the ice habitats were replaced by forests. age under way. Lister adds that the But humans may have delivered
AS I come face-to-face with one of the cutest babies on Earth, my scientific detachment crumbles. Especially when that baby is a 1-month-old who died so quickly in the Siberian muds that her feet are still suspended in the act of struggle, her trunk still clogged up with the silts that suffocated her, and her belly still full of her mother’s coagulated milk. The baby is Lyuba (pronounced Looba), a 42,000-year-old woolly mammoth. The only complete specimen in the world, she has made her first outing in Western Europe to be the centrepiece of an exhibition called Mammoths: Ice Age Giants, at London’s Natural History Museum (NHM). On loan from the Shemanovsky Museum in Salekhard, Siberia, Lyuba stayed frozen in the ice until 2007 when a reindeer herder and his sons discovered her body on the bank of the Yuribei river in northern Russia. At 85 centimetres, she was the height of a human toddler, but she might have ended up over 3.1 metres high at the shoulder, weighed 5 or 6 tonnes, and lived for up to 60 years. Alongside Lyuba are life-size replicas of bears and other woolly mammoths from the Field Museum in Chicago, which created this travelling exhibition, and to which some NHM specimens have been added. It’s quite a struggle to quell the inner 8-year-old when faced with a 3.7-metre-tall, giant short-faced Shhh, don’t wake Lyuba, the 42,000-year-old baby 50 | NewScientist | 14 June 2014
MATT DUNHAM/AP/PRESS ASSOCIATION
Mammoths: Ice Age Giants, Natural History Museum, London, until 7 September
the killer punch as they hunted down the last populations on farflung Arctic islands. In spite of their size, these big mammals were extremely vulnerable, as are modern elephants. The two are so closely related that we can make direct comparisons, says Lister: habitat loss plus hunting could be a lethal combination for modern elephants too. A large part of the exhibition is focused on the Proboscidea, the mammalian order containing both woolly mammoths and modern elephants. That point is made in the first room of the exhibition, which features a model of a hippo-like Moeritherium, thought to be a common ancestor, from about 35 million years ago. A row of scientifically accurate models of Proboscidean heads runs along the wall in evolutionary order, including a small-trunked animal from about 25 million years ago, and the longfaced Gomphotherium, a close relative of the elephant and an ancestor of the woolly mammoth from about 5 million years ago. Visitors are encouraged to make a connection between past and present by touching them – a visceral experience. But for sheer awe, baby Lyuba remains, in all senses, untouchable. When she arrived in London, just days before the exhibition’s launch, staff stood by with bated breath while her crate was opened. “I was blown away to see her in the flesh,” recalls Lister. “It was unforgettable because she’s so perfect.” ■ Shaoni Bhattacharya is a consultant for New Scientist
What a lovely baby! The world’s only complete woolly mammoth tells a complex tale, finds Shaoni Bhattacharya bear on its hind legs on one side increasing frequency of finds like and a prowling sabre-toothed cat Lyuba makes the exhibition on the other. Round the corner, especially timely. there is more terror as a spiralHe hopes visitors will also tune tusked Columbian mammoth, in to the exhibition’s other big a giant among giants at 4 metres message. In a video installation in high, towers over all comers. one of the rooms, Lister connects Clearly, the NHM is poised to the extinction of mammoths with repeat its feat of producing showstoppers in exhibitions telling the “Habitat loss plus hunting could be a story of our not-too-distant past. lethal combination for As palaeontologist Adrian Lister, modern elephants too” the NHM’s scientific adviser on the exhibition, explains, the aim is to get more people excited the fate of the elephant – over about the ice age mammals who 20,000 of which are thought to disappeared relatively recently. have been killed illegally last year. Of course, the blockbuster Lister explains that climate approach may blind visitors to the change could be to blame for the science underpinning such shows. mammoths’ demise, as their That would be a shame, since range shrank when grassland there is much research into the ice habitats were replaced by forests. age under way. Lister adds that the But humans may have delivered
AS I come face-to-face with one of the cutest babies on Earth, my scientific detachment crumbles. Especially when that baby is a 1-month-old who died so quickly in the Siberian muds that her feet are still suspended in the act of struggle, her trunk still clogged up with the silts that suffocated her, and her belly still full of her mother’s coagulated milk. The baby is Lyuba (pronounced Looba), a 42,000-year-old woolly mammoth. The only complete specimen in the world, she has made her first outing in Western Europe to be the centrepiece of an exhibition called Mammoths: Ice Age Giants, at London’s Natural History Museum (NHM). On loan from the Shemanovsky Museum in Salekhard, Siberia, Lyuba stayed frozen in the ice until 2007 when a reindeer herder and his sons discovered her body on the bank of the Yuribei river in northern Russia. At 85 centimetres, she was the height of a human toddler, but she might have ended up over 3.1 metres high at the shoulder, weighed 5 or 6 tonnes, and lived for up to 60 years. Alongside Lyuba are life-size replicas of bears and other woolly mammoths from the Field Museum in Chicago, which created this travelling exhibition, and to which some NHM specimens have been added. It’s quite a struggle to quell the inner 8-year-old when faced with a 3.7-metre-tall, giant short-faced Shhh, don’t wake Lyuba, the 42,000-year-old baby 50 | NewScientist | 14 June 2014
MATT DUNHAM/AP/PRESS ASSOCIATION
Mammoths: Ice Age Giants, Natural History Museum, London, until 7 September
the killer punch as they hunted down the last populations on farflung Arctic islands. In spite of their size, these big mammals were extremely vulnerable, as are modern elephants. The two are so closely related that we can make direct comparisons, says Lister: habitat loss plus hunting could be a lethal combination for modern elephants too. A large part of the exhibition is focused on the Proboscidea, the mammalian order containing both woolly mammoths and modern elephants. That point is made in the first room of the exhibition, which features a model of a hippo-like Moeritherium, thought to be a common ancestor, from about 35 million years ago. A row of scientifically accurate models of Proboscidean heads runs along the wall in evolutionary order, including a small-trunked animal from about 25 million years ago, and the longfaced Gomphotherium, a close relative of the elephant and an ancestor of the woolly mammoth from about 5 million years ago. Visitors are encouraged to make a connection between past and present by touching them – a visceral experience. But for sheer awe, baby Lyuba remains, in all senses, untouchable. When she arrived in London, just days before the exhibition’s launch, staff stood by with bated breath while her crate was opened. “I was blown away to see her in the flesh,” recalls Lister. “It was unforgettable because she’s so perfect.” ■ Shaoni Bhattacharya is a consultant for New Scientist