A 44,000-year-old crime scene
In August 1900, a hunter named Semen Tarabykin was searching for dogs along the Berezovka River in northeastern Siberia when he discovered a woolly mammoth eroding out of a riverbank. The head had been partly eaten by wolves, but the rest of the body was almost perfectly intact, frozen in permafrost for millennia. News of the discovery reached the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, which dispatched an expedition in 1901 led by zoologist Otto Herz and paleontologist Eugen Pfizenmayer.
The team journeyed thousands of miles by train and reindeer sled to reach the remote site. They found the male Mammuthus primigenius in a seated position, as if it had struggled to stand. To excavate the six-ton carcass, the scientists built a heated shed over the site to thaw the surrounding earth. The work was grueling, and the smell of the ancient, decaying flesh was reportedly overpowering. The team dissected the mammoth and transported the frozen pieces back to St. Petersburg, a monumental effort in the early 20th century. Today, the mounted skin and skeleton are on display at the Zoological Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg, posed in the same death position in which it was found.